> The longest English word found 
> in the entire result set was the word "rare".

Ooohhhh the irony! ;-)

> 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.

I'm probably going to have fun trying this with Haskell a bit later. 
[But first I'd need to obtain some English text from somewhere...]

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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