h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Nice article, Lear. Have you any idea what to use for the second example? What about Stephen King? I bet the Markov results read better and scarier.

I was thinking of using something completely inane like the lyrics to a Spice Girls song, for example, and then seeing if the computer's version threw up any 'meaning' hidden within the gibberish. An experiment, in other words, to see if the machine might perhaps also work in *reverse* as a nonsense *eliminating* machine... (!)...

'Out of chaos comes order, out of order comes chaos' - that would be my working hypothesis...


PS - does the article actually make sense to you, then? I mean, does it succeed in giving some idea of what a Markov Chain is actually about? I thought it read very incoherently, when I looked at it a few days ago...

I just reread the article and it makes fine sense to me. The only questionable material is at the very beginning when you explain why the process doesn't work for weather. I don't know what it is in that little paragraph, but it just reads funny (whata critique, huh )

What I enjoy most is the experiment played on the discussion group. And I don't think Mark V. Shaney is a bad play on words at all!

I wish some order would come out of chaos of notes I have for my final paper.

Thanks, Zmrzlina. I agree with you about the first paragraph. I thought it might be a good idea to try to explain something of the technical side of things, but I'm hampered slightly by the fact that I don't really know what I'm talking about! Better, perhaps, to just gloss over this and point the reader in the direction of those references I've included, because they're obviously written by people who know a lot more about it.

I notice that sometimes chaos also comes out of chaos...