TheCodeBreakers
This detection of errors is the first step toward their correction. And in
this correction redundancy again plays the central role. After the
recipient of "endividual" has hunted through his memory and his
dictionary and found that it does not exist in English, he brings up the
sequence "individual," which does exist, from his store of prior
information about English, and corrects his message. If the reader of a
business letter sees the sequence "rhe company," he will recognize "rhe"
as a nonword, will remember that the rules of English often call for a
similar-appearing group of letters, "the," before a noun like "company,"
will perhaps consider that r is near t on the typewriter keyboard, and
then will conclude that "rhe" should be "the."
This process is a first cousin to cryptanalysis.
For cryptanalysts bring to bear in their solutions the same prior
knowledge of rules and spelling and phonetic preferences (that is,