4 ms·
(1/26)^7 .. without getting too fancy with any sort of linguistic probabilities...
by jdrock 17y ago
(1/26)^7 .. without getting too fancy with any sort of linguistic probabilities...
- 10ren 17y ago= about 8,000,000,000 to 1 But capitalization and spacing was correct too.
- yan 17y agoCapitalization would be correct in almost all cases. You always capitalize first letter and chances are, first word of each line won't be the beginning of a sentence. Ditto for spacing, 3-5 line paragraphs are fairly common.
- jcl 17y agoHow do you figure "almost all"? Even if the text could only contain paragraphs of length 3 and 4, the spacing alone would be incorrect in half the cases (assuming that a 3-4 and 4-3 split is equally likely). (Of course, we are leaving aside the fact that the full body of the message contains an additional one-line paragraph, which could also be considered part of a correctly capitalized and spaced message.)
- rbanffy 17y agoOne would have to analyze all previous relevant correspondence out of the AS's office as to measure vocabulary and other structural elements. It would be a fun project.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- gort 17y agoThat's the odds of it happening in 7 specific lines. But what are the odds of it happening by chance at any point in time to any person of Schwarzenegger's importance or higher?
- ars 17y agoWell, let's get fancy: f %2.228 0.02228 u %2.758 0.02758 c %2.782 0.02782 k %0.772 0.00772 y %1.974 0.01974 o %7.507 0.07507 u %2.758 0.02758 = 1/185,399,389,457 This is global letter frequency, I need a table of first letter frequency.
- ars 17y agoCould not find a good first letter table, so made my own from gutenberg, so: f %3.779 0.0378 u %1.487 0.0149 c %3.511 0.0351 k %0.690 0.0069 y %1.620 0.0162 o %6.264 0.0626 u %1.487 0.0149 = 1/487,158,294,227
- pjvandehaar 17y agoOne has to factor in that there are thousands of things he could have printed that would have had roughly the same effect (eg. "Piss off", etc).