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POGenerating a pseudo-natural phrase from a big integer in a reversible way
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  1. POGenerating a pseudo-natural phrase from a big integer in a reversible way
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    copied!<p>I have a large and "unique" integer (actually a SHA1 hash).</p> <p><strong>Note:</strong> While I'm talking here about SHA1 hashes, this is <strong>not</strong> a cryptography / security question! I'm <em>not</em> trying to break SHA1. Imagine a random 160-bit integer instead of SHA1 if that will help.</p> <p>I want (for no other reason than to have fun) to find an algorithm to map that SHA1 hash to a computer-generated (pseudo-)English phrase. The mapping should be bidirectional (i.e., knowing the algorithm, one must be able to calculate the original SHA1 hash from that phrase.)</p> <p>The phrase need not make sense. I would even settle for a whole paragraph of nonsense. (Though quality — englishness — of a paragraph should probably be better than for a mere phrase.)</p> <p>A better algorithm would produce shorter, more natural-looking, more unique phrases. </p> <p>A variation: it is OK if I will be able to work only with a part of hash. Say, first six hex digits is fine.</p> <p>The possible usage of the generated phrase: the human readable version of Git commit ID, to use as a motto for a given program version, which is built from that commit. (As I said, this is "for fun". I don't claim that this is very practical — or be much more readable than the SHA1 itself.)</p> <p><em>Possible approach: In the past I've attempted to build a probability table (of words), and generate phrases as Markov chains, seeding the generator (picking branches from probability tree), according to the bits I read from the SHA. This was not very successful, the resulting phrases were too long and ugly. I'm not sure if this was a bug, or the general flaw in the algorithm, since I had to abandon it early enough.</em></p> <p>Now I'm thinking about attempting to solve the problem once again. Any advice on how to approach this? <em>Do you think Markov chain approach can work here? Something else?</em></p>
 

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