29-04-2022, 04:14 PM
Excellent crash course in Shannon entropy, Koen. If there is an official FAQ, or official prerequisite reading for participation in some of the more advanced discussions here, this should be part of it. I joined this form just as you, Marco, and nablator were starting to play around with these statistics, and I taught myself all I could to try to keep up with these discussions. I wish I’d had this post back in 2018.
In your reply to tavie, you mention h1 and h2 forming a profile which is distinct for any given language. Having read Patrick Feaster’s work on the VMs, I’m inclined to take this out a step further and say that any kind of information has a unique profile of h0, h1, h2, and h1/h2 values. If validated over enough specimens of sufficient length, such a profile could be used to identify the type of information an unknown specimen most likely contains. A weather station’s hourly report data and an electrocardiogram machine’s logs will produce output specimens that are distinct from each other on all these measurements in consistent ways, no matter how they’re encoded. Patrick wrote on his blog that the arrangement of glyphs in the VMs reminds him more than a bit of medieval French business ledgers, where each line represents a transaction and a sum of money expressed in Roman numerals. If any such ledgers have been transcribed in a machine-readable form, I wonder what their entropy values would look like. Closer to medieval prose, or closer to the VMs?
In your reply to tavie, you mention h1 and h2 forming a profile which is distinct for any given language. Having read Patrick Feaster’s work on the VMs, I’m inclined to take this out a step further and say that any kind of information has a unique profile of h0, h1, h2, and h1/h2 values. If validated over enough specimens of sufficient length, such a profile could be used to identify the type of information an unknown specimen most likely contains. A weather station’s hourly report data and an electrocardiogram machine’s logs will produce output specimens that are distinct from each other on all these measurements in consistent ways, no matter how they’re encoded. Patrick wrote on his blog that the arrangement of glyphs in the VMs reminds him more than a bit of medieval French business ledgers, where each line represents a transaction and a sum of money expressed in Roman numerals. If any such ledgers have been transcribed in a machine-readable form, I wonder what their entropy values would look like. Closer to medieval prose, or closer to the VMs?