Re: VMs: superblock update

[Bruce Grant <bgrant@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Marke Fincher wrote:

> At the moment I'm trying to condense what I think I've 
> found into the simplest and purest form (a small block 
> of text that can replicate the entire manuscript). 
Marke:

Sorry, I missed a couple of posts - when you say "a small block of text 
that can replicate the entire manuscript", do you mean a block such that 
the complete VMS manuscript can be constructed by concatenating 
substrings from the block?

Are there any other ground rules? For example, do the strings have to be 
of a certain minimum or maximum length in characters or words, or can 
you use parts of words? Can you make one word of the VMS from parts of 
several or many words in the block or do you have to use complete words? 

The reason I ask is that I did some reading on genetic algorithms a 
while ago and as an example played around with a program to look for 
sets of English words containing all the letters of the alphabet with a 
minimum of duplications. What the algorithm did was to start with random 
sets of words and score them based on how many of the 26 letters they 
contained and the highest number of duplicates of a letter. The lowest 
scoring 50% of the sets were discarded and the rest were "crossbred" by 
dividing them into two subsets and randomly joining pairs of subsets to 
create as many new sets as had been discarded. After numerous 
iterations, the best resulting set covered all 26 letters of the 
alphabet with words totalling only 29 letters in length.

I think that what you are trying to do might be approachable with a 
similar way.

Regards,

Bruce


______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list