Nonsense

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Teaching machines to talk nonsense

It is far harder for cryptographers to deal with the presence or absence of meaning in a text in which the level of redundancy and repetition is higher than found in natural languages: for example, in the mysterious text of the Voynich manuscript. Some have attempted to create text that in fact carries no meaning, but still complies with the regularities predicted by Zipf's law. The Markov chain technique is one such method. This has occasionally been put into the service of surrealistic jokes; the fake Usenet poster Mark V Shaney posted texts generated by a Markov chain algorithm, and frequently launched flame wars with his unfathomable screeds.

Related Topics:
Voynich manuscript - Markov chain - Surrealistic - Joke - Fake - Usenet - Mark V Shaney - Flame

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The Markov chain technique is one method that has been used to generate texts by algorithm and randomizing techniques that seem meaningful. Another could be called the Mad Libs method: it involves the creation of templates for various sentence structures, and filling in the blanks with noun phrases or verb phrases; these phrase generation procedures can be looped to add recursion and give the output the appearance of greater complexity and sophistication. Racter was a computer program that generated nonsense texts by this method; unfortunately, Racter's book, The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed, proved to have been the product of heavy human editing of the output of the program.

Related Topics:
Text - Random - Mad Libs - Template - Noun phrase - Verb phrase - Recursion - Racter

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