10x compression factor

[Chris Fox]

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Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder wrote:
| On Tuesday 10 February 2004 20.15, Steve Butler wrote:
|
|
|>As for novels, some I've (started to) read seemed a lot more repetitive
|>than technical specs.  Perhaps checking the compression ratio should be
|>part of the test for good novels. --tongue in cheek--
|
|
| There is actually a paper somewhere out there (meaning: in some CS
journal)
| about determining the probably author of a text by comparing its
compression
| rate to other texts from known authors.
|
| Of course, the whole thing was tongue in cheek, but IIRC they did have
some
| numbers and the general direction of their research was not just made up.

NOT tongue in cheek: if you have letter-frequency tables as short as
four letters long and set a random-generator based on those tables, you
can often recognize the writer in the generated text, by his writing
style.  With six letters it's very robust but even with four you get
Faulkner-like text from Faulkner letter frequency table.

- --
Chris Fox, Windows User, Linux User (#341856), non-partisan
Since free markets lead directly to monopoly, oligarchy, poverty,
unemployment, and Fascism, they cannot be said to "work" in any
meaningful sense.
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