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

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

	Looking back, I think the person who made that remark on 
the NASA forum was thinking about the binomial token length 
distribution.  So you may be talking about different things 
here.  Knox has shown us natural language
texts that have a nearly binomial token length distribution.

	Which reminds me.  Gabriel, you never did tell us how and 
from what source you produced that Voynichese-like text last 
year.  Are you ready?  I give up.  :-)

Dennis

Knox Mix wrote:

> 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).
>
> 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.

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