Social media is the powerful platform of the 21st century. It has become the primary source of digital marketing, expressing opinions, making friends, mode of entertainment, and whatnot. Social media apps keep innovating and changing to keep the users engaged by showing the right content understanding their behavior. It’s also common to see new challenges trending from time to time where many celebrities post about it. One such challenge trending at current times is the “Guess the Gibberish challenge”.

I am sure you must have taken or at least seen people take this challenge. In this challenge, some gibberish text appears on the screen which seems nonsense but sounds to something meaningful. Let’s see some examples.

Me taking the Gibberish Challenge

I have personally tried it and I can vouch that it can be addicting at times. Being an algorithm enthusiast first thing that came to mind was how can I create one such challenge myself. I did some research around and created a simple version of the game. This simple version can be made complicated with some tweaks around that I will discuss at the end as an open-ended problem. There can be many different ways of creating it. In this blog post, I will discuss one such possible way. All the codes used in this blog post can be found here. So, let’s get started.

You can also find my Youtube video on this topic.

My Youtube video on this topic

Phonetic Algorithms

As per Wikipedia, Phonetics is the science of the sounds of the human voice. Subject matter experts in this field are called Phoneticians. The Linguistic based study of Phonetics is termed as Phonology.

A phonetic algorithm is an algorithm for indexing of words by their pronunciation. These algorithms provide the capability to identify words with a similar pronunciation.

The first question that can come to the reader’s mind is why are we discussing Phonetics and Phonetic algorithms. The answer is that in the problem we are trying to solve, “Guess the Gibberish challenge”, the Gibberish sounds similar to something meaningful that is to be decoded and which is also the final motive. Intuitively, it comes to mind that some Phonetic Algorithm can help with that. There are many good Phonetic Algorithms and one such popular and simple one is the Soundex algorithm.

Soundex Algorithm

Soundex Algorithm encodes English words into a code where the first place consists of a letter followed by ‘k-1’ numeric digits, given that we want ‘k’ bit encoding.

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