Re: LSC and the VMS

["Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Meaningful vs. meaningless texts... I think we are missing the point.
Meaningful texts can only be written with valid words allowing for a 
few words that one may not know the meaning PLUS some kind of 
valid grammar. 

So monkey character texts can never be meaningful  (at least for 
relatively low orders) because most of the words are not valid 
(although statistically indistinguishable) and there is no underlying 
grammar.

On the other hand, word-monkey texts are meaningless texts to 
which one can assign some "meaning" which arises from 2 facts. 
All words are valid and the n-order word transition probabilities are 
in fact re-constructing in statistical terms the building blocks of the 
grammar structure that can be derived from the original texts.
Of course these are not "meaningful" in the sense of being the 
result of a thinking process, they are just (let's say) statistically 
meaningful. 

So where does this leave us? I think that the construction of 
concordance tables is the first attempt to find some structure larger 
than the words level (of course this is very much related to n-order 
word monkey probability tables). Jorge did this table, but I am not 
sure about how to carry that further on.

Perhaps we can attack the problem from 2 points of view.
1. Look at it statistically at the character level, LSC, long range 
correlations, Hurst exponent, etc. Very nice, but we always seems 
to be getting the same result: the vms is not random, but we're not 
sure whether there is a language. More, the problem we face is that 
we do not have a clue about how language-like gibberish could 
anybody produce.

2. Try to find the building blocks of the underlying grammar. 
I think that  this is crucial to make sure that there is a language to be 
cracked. 

And we also have "meaningful texts" that are not logical, or just 
wrong meaning, but that is another story.

Cheers,

Gabriel