Re: VMs: RE: Nasa Astronomy Picture of The Day

[Knox Mix <knoxmix@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gabriel Landini wrote:
> The distribution of words is a inverse power law -- which is what the great 
> majority of languages exhibit (Zipf's law) and the distribution of characters 
> is far from being uniformly distributed (which is what throwing a dice would 
> produce).
>
> Cheers,
>
> Gabriel
> _

Dice. In clarification of what I said, I think many non-uniform 
distributions can be obtained by cycling through lines containing 
different series of substitution letters including repeats, skips and a 
few pairs, varying the cycles, using different sets of dice -- also in 
varying cycles -- and tweaking. I did not intend to imply that a 
standard dice game could mimic statistics of language. How well results 
might be made to resemble language by the above scheme is not known. I 
do not know whether or not similar results are common, uncommon or 
impossible in card games or other games. That is what I meant by saying 
that the quoted statement covered a lot of territory. I do not think 
such an exercise has any direct relevance to the VMS.

Regards,

Knox
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