Related papers: Shakespeare, Entropy and Educated Monkeys
The Infinite Monkey Theorem states that if one monkey randomly hits the keys in front of a typewriter keyboard during an infinite amount of time, any works written by William Shakespeare will almost surely be typed out at the end of the…
Does combining a finite collection of objects infinitely many times guarantee the construction of a particular object? Here we use recursive function theory to examine the popular scenario of an infinite collection of typing monkeys…
This article explores the theoretical and computational aspects of the Infinite Monkey Theorem, investigating the number of attempts and the time required for a set of pseudorandom characters to assemble and recite Hamlets iconic phrase, To…
The availability of quantitative text analysis methods has provided new ways of analyzing literature in a manner that was not available in the pre-information era. Here we apply comprehensive machine learning analysis to the work of William…
A simple method for finding the entropy and redundancy of a reasonable long sample of English text by direct computer processing and from first principles according to Shannon theory is presented. As an example, results on the entropy of…
A fundamental result in psycholinguistics is that less predictable words take a longer time to process. One theoretical explanation for this finding is Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), which quantifies a word's predictability as…
It has been shown in a recent publication that words in human-produced English language tend to have an information content close to the conditional entropy. In this paper, we show that the same is true for events in human-produced…
Variations in writing styles are commonly used to adapt the content to a specific context, audience, or purpose. However, applying stylistic variations is still by and large a manual process, and there have been little efforts towards…
By determining which were the most common English words and phrases since the beginning of the 16th century, we obtain a unique large-scale view of the evolution of written text. We find that the most common words and phrases in any given…
Probabilistic text generators have been used to produce fake scientific papers for more than a decade. Such nonsensical papers are easily detected by both human and machine. Now more complex AI-powered generation techniques produce texts…
Drawing upon a body of research on the evolution of creativity, this paper proposes a theory of how, when, and why the forward-thinking story-telling abilities of humans evolved, culminating in the visionary abilities of science fiction…
A "monkey book" is a book consisting of a random distribution of letters and blanks, where a group of letters surrounded by two blanks is defined as a word. We compare the statistics of the word distribution for a monkey book with the…
This paper presents an exploration of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks in the realm of text generation, focusing on the utilization of historical datasets for Shakespeare and Nietzsche. LSTMs, known for their effectiveness in handling…
This paper presents a statistical parser for natural language that obtains a parsing accuracy---roughly 87% precision and 86% recall---which surpasses the best previously published results on the Wall St. Journal domain. The parser itself…
Over the past two decades, numerous studies have demonstrated how less predictable (i.e., higher surprisal) words take more time to read. In general, these studies have implicitly assumed the reading process is purely responsive: Readers…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
The entropy rate of printed English is famously estimated to be about one bit per character, a benchmark that modern large language models (LLMs) have only recently approached. This entropy rate implies that English contains nearly 80…
We examine recent research that asks whether current AI systems may be developing a capacity for "scheming" (covertly and strategically pursuing misaligned goals). We compare current research practices in this field to those adopted in the…
What is the productivity of Science? Can we measure an evolution of the production of mathematicians over history? Can we predict the waiting time till the proof of a challenging conjecture such as the P-versus-NP problem? Motivated by…
Beyond the local constraints imposed by grammar, words concatenated in long sequences carrying a complex message show statistical regularities that may reflect their linguistic role in the message. In this paper, we perform a systematic…