@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @TimWardCam@c.im @technicaladept@techhub.social Markov Chains were known before Clarke's short story. There's a famous popsci article written by Brian Hayes published in Scientific American in 1983 that popularized the concept to non-experts: http://bit-player.org/extras/bph-publications/SciAm-1983-11-Hayes-drivel.pdf (That article inspired me as a high schooler to write small Basic and Pascal programs using Markov Chain text generators.)