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blurb - explore the numeronyms of a wordset

Python package for exploring numeronymic properties of wordsets. For example:

• Finding the subset of a wordset which bear a common numeronym
  • For example, "k3k" could equivalently represent:
    • kayak
    • kiosk
    • klick
    • knack
    • knock
• Finding the numeronyms of a wordset that are unique and collision-free
  • For example, the only word that can be uniquely compressed into "b3b" is "blurb".
  • For example, the only numeronym which starts and ends with "b" (e.g. "bxb") without collisions is "blurb"
• Analyze the frequency of collisions

Motivation

I was thinking about the numeronym of the venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz. "a16z" is used to identify the company, including their twitter handle.

A  N  D  R  E  E  S  S  E  N  H  O  R  O  W  I  T  Z

A  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Z

A16Z

The interesting thing about this shorthand is that it represents a compression function. This is adjacent to the concept of a hash function in cryptography. Note that these are general usages of the terms - in more rigorous contexts there would be objection to this classification.

When selecting a hash function, it is imperative that it be collision-free. Could the numeronym act as a cryptographic hash function?

The answer is absolutely not - I'll show you in the mouse scrolls to follow.

However, there are some exceptions. Numeronyms may be good candidates for a cipher by leveraging the prevalence of collisions.

This python package will be considered successful if it can be used to make either Marc Andreessen or Ben Horowitz chuckle.

Install

todo

What is it and what can it do?

blurb is a Python package that provides the following classes and functions. Examples are shown below.

Some observations from analyzing a large English wordset?

todo

Dependencies

todo

License

BSD 3