0000000000240369
AUTHOR
Shlomo Havlin
Numerical Analysis of Word Frequencies in Artificial and Natural Language Texts
We perform a numerical study of the statistical properties of natural texts written in English and of two types of artificial texts. As statistical tools we use the conventional Zipf analysis of the distribution of words and the inverse Zipf analysis of the distribution of frequencies of words, the analysis of vocabulary growth, the Shannon entropy and a quantity which is a nonlinear function of frequencies of words, the frequency "entropy". Our numerical results, obtained by investigation of eight complete books and sixteen related artificial texts, suggest that, among these analyses, the analysis of vocabulary growth shows the most striking difference between natural and artificial texts…
Correlated randomness and switching phenomena
One challenge of biology, medicine, and economics is that the systems treated by these serious scientific disciplines have no perfect metronome in time and no perfect spatial architecture—crystalline or otherwise. Nonetheless, as if by magic, out of nothing but randomness one finds remarkably fine-tuned processes in time and remarkably fine-tuned structures in space. Further, many of these processes and structures have the remarkable feature of “switching” from one behavior to another as if by magic. The past century has, philosophically, been concerned with placing aside the human tendency to see the universe as a fine-tuned machine. Here we will address the challenge of uncovering how, th…