ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Separating words problem

Okay kiddo, So do you know what words are, right? They are a bunch of letters that we say out loud to tell the meaning. Sometimes these words can be grouped together to make a sentence or a phrase. But what happens when you have a bunch of words without any spaces between them, how do you know where one word ends and the other begins? This is where the separating words problem comes in.

Imagine you are eating a pizza, and the toppings are all mixed up together. What if you wanted to separate the toppings one by one to eat them separately? You would use a knife to cut the pizza into slices, right? Similarly, when you have a bunch of words without any spaces in between, you need to figure out where each word starts and ends. But instead of using a knife, we use our brain.

Our brain is very good at detecting patterns in things. So when we see a bunch of letters together, our brain starts to look for patterns to figure out where the words are separated. It looks for things like uppercase letters or special characters like dots or commas. For example, if we see "ILOVEICECREAM", we know that it is three words because the first word starts with an "I", the second word starts with an "L", and the third word starts with an "I" again.

Sometimes though, there are no patterns or clues to indicate where the separating words are. This is when we might need to use some guesswork and context to separate the words. For example, if we see "hewenttotheschool", we might guess that it should be "he went to the school" because it makes sense in the context of a sentence.

So, in summary, the separating words problem is all about figuring out where one word ends and another begins when they are all mixed up together without any spaces or clues. Our brain helps us by looking for patterns and using context to make educated guesses.