2026-09-06 17:12 UTC
@TimWardCam@c.im @technicaladept@techhub.social
I grew up on his stories and I loved them, but his doesn't give Clarke precedent. A friend of mine was generating text with Hidden Markov Models a couple years before that. (They need to be trained on a corpus first)
And my friend wasn't first, either, he had read about others doing the same. I'm not sure who was earliest.
Heuristic: if "word processor" is in the title, it probably wasn't first with a computer algorithm.
Replies (1)
-
@hzulla@infosec.exchange 2026-09-07 08:53
@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.)