In an unpublished spoof written a year later, Shannon imagined the damage his methods would do if they fell into the wrong hands. It seems that an evil Nazi scientist, Dr. Hagen Krankheit, had escaped Germany with a prototype of his Müllabfuhrwortmaschine, a fearsome weapon of war “anticipated in the work . . . of Dr. Claude Shannon.” Krankheit’s machine used the principles of randomized text to totally automate the propaganda industry. By randomly stitching together agitprop phrases in a way that approximated human language, the Müllabfuhrwortmaschine could produce an endless flood of
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