VMs: Left and right entropy

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I eventually got around to reading Akinori Ito's
paper.  

What it means is that if you pick a word in an English
text you can guess the one before and the one after
with a small chance of being right. Example: if you
pick "the" you can be pretty sure that the next word
is not going to be "in" or "at" or "though", but that
it is likely to be "old" (or some other adjective) or
"world" (or some other noun).

If you do the same in Voynichese, you have little 
hope of guessing what word comes before, or after,
although your chance of guessing the next word is
slightly better than guessing the previous word.

I could take Hungarian as a possible language 
which behaves like that, but I will stick to
English, and not only English, but Genesis, 
King James's version.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the
earth.

You can see that what follows, say, "the" is 
roughly predictable: it's a noun, or adjective,
or an adverb like "very".

Let me spell it slightly differently:

Inthebeginning God created theheaven and theearth.

This destroys much of the predictability. In entropic
jargon: it increases the entropy of Genesis. I would
say by a great deal.

I leave you to think about it.


Frogguy.


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