In the Beginning was Information

with equal frequency, then sequences of letters (output A in Figure 38) areobtained which do not at all reflect the simplest statistical characteristicsof German, or English, or any other language. Seen statistically, we wouldnever obtain a text which would even approximately resemble the morphologicalproperties of a given language.One can go a step further by writing program (2) which takes the actualfrequency of letter combinations of a language into consideration (Germanin this case). It may happen that the statistical links between successiveletters are ignored, so that we would have a first order approximation.Karl Küpfmüller’s [K4] example of such a sequence is given as output B,but no known word is generated. If we now ensure that the probabilities oflinks between successive letters are also accounted for, outputs C, D, andE are obtained. Such sequences can be found by means of stochasticMarkov processes, and are called Markov chains.Program (2) requires extensive inputs which take all the groups of letters(bigrams, trigrams, etc) appearing in Table 4, into account, as well as theirprobability of occurrence in German. With increased ordering, syntheticwords arise, some of which can be recognised as German words, but structureslike “gelijkwaardig”, “ryljetek”,and “fortuitousness” are increasinglyprecluded by the programming. What is more, only a subset of the morphologicallytypical German sounding groups like WONDINGLIN,ISAR, ANORER, GAN, STEHEN, and DISPONIN are actual Germanwords. Even in the case of the higher degree approximations one cannotprevent the generation of words which do not exist at all in speech usage.A next step would be program (3) where only actual German syllablesand their frequency of occurrence are employed. Then, in conclusion, program(4) prevents the generation of groups of letters which do not occurin German. Such a program requires a complete dictionary to be stored,and word frequencies are also taken into account (first approximation). Asa second approximation the probability of one word following another isalso considered. It should be noted that the programs involved, as well asFigure 38: “Language synthesis” experiments for determining whether informationcan arise by chance.Sequences of letters, syllables, and words (including spaces) are obtained bymeans of computer programs. The letters, all combinations of letters, syllables,and words (a complete German lexicon) were used as inputs. Their known frequenciesof occurrence in German texts are fully taken into account in this “languagesynthesis”. The resulting random sequences A to I do not comprise information, inspite of the major programming efforts required. These sequences are semanticnonsense, and do not correspond with any aspect of reality.203