************************************************** MADMONK - GEM Text Travesty Generator (c) 1988 Don E. Farmer 16810 Deer Creek Dr. Spring, TX 77379 This is SHAREWARE. It is not to be sold. A donation of $5.00 is requested, please. ************************************************** GEM Text Travesty Generator Have you ever felt mimsy? Not sure? Perhaps you could ask the borogoves. But then they may not answer because the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. These nonsense words are from Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky." This judicious juxtaposition of letters is fun. Maybe the author of Alice in Wonderland had a travesty generator! Generating travesties arose, perhaps, from a pronouncement by Sir Arthur Eddington at Cambridge in 1927: "If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum." William Ralph Bennett, Jr. gives an account of this in his chapter on Language in Scientific and Engineering Problem-Solving with the Computer, Prentice Hall 1976. He terms it "monkeys at the typewriters." I do not know who coined the term "travesty." MADMONK is a GEM based travesty generator. I have tried to make its use self-evident with a HELP menu. I would like for you to try the program now. You can come back to the following text later. I fear that once I use the term probability matrix some of you will think the program too mathematical and never give it a chance. For some fun you will need only a text file with which to make a travesty. Using Eddington's analogy, each of MADMONK'S typewriters have 27 keys, the letters A though Z and the space key. If all keys are equally probable, the typed output is termed zero order. This merely exercises the random number generator, the monkeys. Higher order travesties require an input text. A first order travesty is one in which the output text is correlated to the frequency of each letter in the input text. The higher order travesties are generalizations of the first order. So let's concentrate on the first order. Suppose the input text is one of Shakespeare's plays. MADMONK reserves 27 places in memory to store the count of each letter as it is read. Allow me an analogy. Imagine a road with 27 bridges. The distances between the bridges varies greatly, analogous to the letter count. The natives who live between the bridges speak differing languages each of which consists of only a single letter. (I guess the ones who "speak a space" say nothing at all.) Suppose you are at the start of this road and plan to drive a certain distance to a friend's house. Since you're not sure just how far it is, you stop and ask a fellow on the side of the road. Now this fellow who happens to know your friend, alas, has terrible number sense. In essence he gives you a random number. So you drive this distance and instead of finding your friend, you find people who speak only the letter 'L', say. Thinking you've erred, you go back to the start of the road and ask the stranger again, get another random distance to travel, and come up with yet another letter. If you were to continue to retrieve letters in this manner, they would spell out what is termed a first order Shakespearean travesty. Mathematically speaking, these numbers, the letter count or the distances between the bridges, form a 1 x 27 correlation matrix. One dimensional matrices are called vectors, and when there is nothing to correlate with, the components are called frequencies. A second order travesty is one in which the output text is correlated to the frequency of letter pairs in the input text. In other words, MADMONK counts the number of AA's, AB's, ... , ZZ's, ... , 's in the input text. This results in a correlation matrix, one with 27 rows and 27 columns. The matrix requires 2,916 bytes. That is (2*27)*(2*27), each element being an unsigned 16 bit integer. Using a hard disk it takes about 12 seconds to do a travesty on 3K input file. All output travesties consist of 10,000 characters. If more is needed, MADMONK can be run again and the output files merged with a text editor. A third order travesty is one in which the output text is correlated to the frequency of letter triplets in the input text. The probability matrix is 27 x 27 x 27, which requires 157,464 bytes. About 50 seconds are required to do a 3K input file. A fourth order travesty is one in which the output text is correlated to the frequency of letter quadruplets in the input text. "THE" and "AND" are common quadruplets. The matrix is 27 x 27 x 27 x 27. But (2*27) raised to the 4th power is 8,503,056. Eight megabytes exceed the memory of most machines. It is possible, of course, to use the hard disk as storage. There is, however, a speed penalty to pay. I chose another alternative. At this point I changed the element size of the matrix from 16 bits to 8 bits. Since 27 raised to the 4th power is 531,441, a one megabyte machine can store the matrix. However, with only 8 bits the size of the input text is limited. If there are more than 255 "the's" or "and's", for example, in the input text, the 8 bit matrix elements will overflow. MADMONK will warn you if this happens. It takes about 3 minutes to do a 3K input file. A fifth order travesty is one in which the output text is correlated to the frequency of letter quintets in the input text. Raising 27 to the 5th power yields 14,348,907. So a 16 megabyte partition on the hard disk drive could hold the matrix. There is another alternative. A fifth order matrix can be approximated with two fourth order ones. In years past I have approximated a third order matrix with two second order ones. This was when I worked with a computer that had only 4K of main memory and tape drives. I must not have been too pleased with the results because I no longer have my notes. For now I can only say that the fifth order travesty is in my in basket. The mathematical details of how these matrices are built from the input text and how the output text is constrained to match the probability spectrum are open to view in the C source code listing. Scoping precludes further elucidation on either the C language or probability theory. (Cryptic, enough?) I do hope my analogy of the first order was helpful to those less mathematically inclined. It is time to end the discussion on how MADMONK works and move on to hint at what feeling mimsy is all about. Or to put it another way, what do you do with a travesty anyway? How intelligible a travesty is, as you have seen from running MADMONK, depends on the order. It also depends on the input text. Travesties on different authors yield different correlation matrices. Identifying unknown or disputed authors with the computer entails doing certain statistics on these matrices. With some authors you get words, with others you get complete sentences that might interest the borogoves. Shakespeare travesties are vulgar. The thought has crossed my mind to send one off to a smut peddler. Just a fleeting thought! Yet in a travesty of Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! profanity is rare. On the surface the styles of the two authors do not seem to differ that much. I choose to leave the word "style" undefined. (Technically, there is a homeomorphism between thermodynamics and information theory. This means that you can talk about letter entropy.) As a final hint, MADMONK can lead you to a land, where I hope you don't think this article has already led you, Cryptogamica. Seriously though, the monkeys don't care whether its English or Russian they're typing. (I can't tell you more because it's TOP SECRET.) ******************************************************************* The text above was written some time ago. There is a serious side to all of this, and it has to do with entropy and language. I am interested in travesties because I have been exploring how much randomness there is in creativity for many years now. I think there is a lot. MADMONK V1.3 PD, as presently stands, is robust. I am now looking at the generation of morphenes, i.e., "pieces" of words that are more than letters yet not quite words but of which words are made out of. There are many more of these than letters, but you also get a more "meaningful" travesty too. Well, have fun with this.