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human error

Posted: Sat Jun 09, 2007 10:05 am
by phpdevuk
i got asked to deal with human error when it comes to a database of 1000s of numeric ids, my solution was to transfer numbers to words and soundex them, which works really well for finding similar numbers, as it happened i didn';t nered to use it but still was supprised by soundedx ability to spot similar numbers

Posted: Sat Jun 09, 2007 3:33 pm
by feyd
Is this a question, blog, or line of discussion?

If the latter, please elaborate.

Posted: Sat Jun 09, 2007 5:22 pm
by Arawn
feyd wrote:Is this a question, blog, or line of discussion?
I bet he's campaigning for "Most Peculiar" member of the year. :wink:
my solution was to transfer numbers to words and soundex them, which works really well for finding similar numbers
That's rather a unique solution though. But ... what solution did you use finally?

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 5:30 am
by phpdevuk
I just liked the idea of using soundex to find similar numbers, ultimately it never got used as it wouldn't be needed, so i never got off the playing around generating codes bit. Thought i'd post it to discuss the issue of dealing with human input error as its quite hard to suggest close alternatives when any part of a four digit number or more can be wrong. Using soundex would prove to be too hard i reckon and is just one of my more creative ideas, lol converting the numbers into words at the mysql stage would be awkward. Anyone got any thoughts, other than what is this madman dribbling about :)

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 7:50 am
by superdezign
Well... A good amount of human error on computers consists of typos rather than completely getting a number wrong... I'm not sure what the logic is behind the input, but you could assume that no one number is more than one away from the value it was meant to be.

Of course, that's assuming they don't use the number pad. :?

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 12:59 pm
by phpdevuk
yeah i did think of just generating say ten numbers either side. But my problem was that the correct number might be say 4111 and the user might have input 4121 or 4112 (bad example I know but hopefully you get the idea). The soundex codes for numbers like that are all very similar, which is why it jumped at me as something to try.
I blame the cold i had last week :)