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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> http://blog.plover.com/lang/finnpar.html
>
> I've never actually seen any text written in Finnish, so... does this
> look even remotely plausible?
>
Scientific American had an article on this in the late 1980's. The
author first tried making random text by selecting letters, based on
their frequency in the English language. The longest English word found
in the entire result set was the word "rare".
The author then tried to generate text based on letter pairs; the
algorithm, having one letter, searched for that letter and randomly
selected the letter to follow based on the frequency of letters that
followed in the source text. This produced results that looked a lot
like English.
He then tried using longer strings of letters, by matching pairs of
letters and choosing the next letter based on the letters following the
pair to be matched. The results were much better this time; many of the
resulting words were actual English words, and the ones that weren't
could be taken for words with which the reader was not unfamiliar.
Setting the match string to a longer length made it more likely that the
random text would consists of lengthy passages from the source text.
He then tried a different tack; instead of matching letters, he decided
to match whole words. A word to follow the current word was randomly
chosen from all of the words that follow the current word. This
produced interesting results as well.
I had fun using AmigaBASIC to test out these ideas.
Regards,
John
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