[Doctor Stochastic]

Any string generation system that has a "blank" character that creates "words" rather than runtogethersentences will follow Zipf's law whether the genration is random or directed. There's a paper from the Santa Fé Institute (or of their first) that discusses the matter. (I don't remember the paper or author.) Zipf's law doesn't have much content as far as I can see. (Perhaps someone will find some expnanatory power in the law someday and I'll change my mind.) Plotting frequency as a function of rank is a bit like measuring gasses and plotting the pressure vs the log of the pressure.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your post!

You might want to take a peek at the big pdf I recommended above. They go into Zipf in considerable detail, including “emergence” in Section 6 and how Zipf is applicable (page 22-23).

Lurkers: “emergence” is where the word combinations (phrases) take on meaning.

[js1138]

placekarker