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Not exactly the same, but my favorite visceral examples of imperfect heuristics are "garden-path sentences"[1]. These are sentences that trick you into having to backtrack when you're parsing them, which brings the whole parsing process into sharp relief.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence

A good example is:

    The old man the boat.
Figure out why this sentence is actually grammatically valid and then read the article.


To save everyone the trouble of reading a lot to learn a little: "man" is a verb in that sentence.

Though if I wanted to be clever I could hammer that into less garden-pathy sentence as follows:

"In my will, I left everything to the one who could use it best. I gave the boy the legos. I gave the girl the dollhouse. I gave the mother the kitchen set. The father the hunting rifle. The bachelor the suit. The old man the boat."




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