c4countdown

I was just thinking, is there any way of telling which symbols are numbers and which are letters just by looking at them? Is there a statistical pattern? If there was a new number or letter, would you have a better than 50% chance of guessing whether it was a number or letter? What makes a symbol obviously a number or a letter?

I generally think of numbers as more like upper case letters so you can start off by looking at them, but extend to lower case if you want.

I'd guess there are some pretty strong co-occurrence patterns you can probably use, assuming a system at least vaguely similar to the Arabic place system. If they can decipher Linear B then digits vs letters should be no problem.

Charlie Reams wrote:I'd guess there are some pretty strong co-occurrence patterns you can probably use, assuming a system at least vaguely similar to the Arabic place system. If they can decipher Linear B then digits vs letters should be no problem.

OK, cheers. But what would you say intuitively marks out say W as a letter and 6 as a number?