Re: VMs: Long-range correlations

[Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 21 September 2004 02:25, Bruce Grant wrote:
> Jorge Stolfi wrote:
> >The long-range correlations are probably due to changes in vocabulary
> >induced by changes in subject matter.
>
> Another explanation occurs to me for words which recurr in one part of a
> text and not in another: if you are attempting to create "random" text,
> it is not unusual to find yourself repeating the same word until you
> realize that you have been using it a lot, and start avoiding it.

I have heard many times this but I have never seen any evidence for this 
effect accounting for long range correlations. I mean, humans perform poorly 
as random number generators, sure, but is this the same as saying that they 
introduce long range correlations?

Most of these claims seem to be for sequences of numbers. I would like to see 
something like this for characters in groups of words (so, not only nonsense, 
but this has to satisfy Zipf's law).

I wonder how easy it would be to generalise this, though. I would not be 
surprised if the idea of random text is different for a Hawaiian than it is 
for a Chinese.
(Keyboard-typed text/numbers are out, as there is a possible bias in the 
position of the keys).

Cheers,

Gabriel

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