A recipe in a cookery book is not, in any sense, a blueprint for the cake that will finally emerge from the oven. This is not because the recipe is a one-dimensional string of words whereas the cake is a three-dimensional object. As we have seen, it is perfectly possible, by a scanning procedure, to render a scale model into a one-dimensional code. But a recipe is not a scale model, not a description of a finished cake, not in any sense a point-for-point representation. It is a set of instructions which, if obeyed in the right order, will result in a cake. A true one-dimensionally coded blueprint of a cake would consist of a series of scans through the cake, as though a skewer were passed through it repeatedly in an orderly sequence across and down the cake. At millimetre intervals the immediate surroundings of the skewer's point would be recorded in code; for instance, the exact coordinates of every currant and crumb would be retrievable from the serial data. There would be strict one-to-one mapping between each bit of the cake and a corresponding bit of the blueprint. Obviously this is nothing like a real recipe. There is no one-to-one mapping between 'bits' of cake and words or letters of the recipe. If the words of the recipe map onto anything, it is not single bits of the finished cake but single steps in the procedure for making a cake.
