Woe is us, as technology starts suffering from senility before humanity as a whole does

Aug 6, 2013 08:43 GMT  ·  By

Normally, accusing someone of senility is one of the most standard insults anyone can throw at people who seem to be more forgetful than is warranted. It's also something that old people get accused of by rude youngsters.

Thus, it's not a word you'd expect to hear in the description of a copy machine, but we dare say it fits the problem that some Xerox copiers have begun to exhibit.

German computer scientist David Kriesel has discovered that some copy machines have started producing scans that aren't close to the originals at all.

Copiers usually just duplicate whatever happens to be written or drawn on the paper sheets being scanned.

They are also, nowadays, advanced enough to operate as large scanners and generators of TIFF, PDF and other virtual documents.

Sadly, it seems that some photocopiers are producing document scans that look like the originals but have numbers switched at random.

It makes one wonder if, maybe, the legend of gremlins has more truth to it than anyone thought. Sure, these aren't airplanes, but it's not like there are any air fights going on between the East and West now. We imagine that even Gremlins need something to do now that the World Wars aren't around to give them opportunities for amusement anymore.

An example of a messed up scan is when a Xerox WorkCentre 7535 resized the rooms in the floorplans of David Kriesel. One room annotated as being 21.11 square meters (roughly 277 square feet) ended up at 14.13 square meters (152 sq. ft.).

In a similar fashion, a room that should have been 17.42 square meters (187.5 sq. ft.) suffered the same.

In both cases, the copier took the numbers from a third room, the only one that was supposed to be of 14.13 square meters (152 sq. ft.). Weird.

Also, a table of prices suffered as well, turning €65.40 / $86.71 into €85.40 / $113.22.

Kriesel believes it's all due to the compression format used by the copy machine. JBIG2, for example, is designed for black-and-white (bitonal) images and recognizes text-like portions of the image, which it breaks down into a series of symbols (one per character). The compressed image winds up with a sequence of symbols along with a dictionary to look up the shape each symbol corresponds to. The Xerox machines are somehow mixing up those symbols.