15-04-2017, 08:47 AM
There is of course yet another possibility. This would be (e.g.) that only the first words of each line contain meaning, and the rest is meaningless filler. Thus the text would be 90% meaningless.
A more subtle variation of this would be that the first word is a pointer (a number) that says which word on the line is the one that is meaningful.
Again, there are both arguments for and against these possibilities, but the point was not to go into that here.
With respect to Donalds point about Montemurro:
The problem is that the transition probabilities have been extracted from the end result (the text as we know it). This creates a vicious circle. As Nick already pointed out, this is also not an approach that can be assumed for an early 15th century person.
The same method was already used by Bennett, and implemented in Jacques Guy's Monkey program, though that strictly works with single characters. I think one of the main differences is that in the present method words are split into a start and an end. This helps to avoid frequent long words, which will naturally arise in the more standard 'monkey' procedure.
There are some nice example texts in Bennett's book, for example pseudo-English generated by this procedure, based on transition probabilities of Edgar Allen Poe's writings.
A more subtle variation of this would be that the first word is a pointer (a number) that says which word on the line is the one that is meaningful.
Again, there are both arguments for and against these possibilities, but the point was not to go into that here.
With respect to Donalds point about Montemurro:
The problem is that the transition probabilities have been extracted from the end result (the text as we know it). This creates a vicious circle. As Nick already pointed out, this is also not an approach that can be assumed for an early 15th century person.
The same method was already used by Bennett, and implemented in Jacques Guy's Monkey program, though that strictly works with single characters. I think one of the main differences is that in the present method words are split into a start and an end. This helps to avoid frequent long words, which will naturally arise in the more standard 'monkey' procedure.
There are some nice example texts in Bennett's book, for example pseudo-English generated by this procedure, based on transition probabilities of Edgar Allen Poe's writings.