/// This blog re-uses snippets of text found on other blogs with the PHP Markov chain text generator made by Hay Kranen. /// Alice same she shore and seemed to remark myself, as she went back to the heard at Alice hastily, after open her sister. Here, Bill! The Duchess too late it a bit had a sort of they are the Queen. An invitation a little of the ran what it was only down her to the other; the Dodo, a Lory and the please that it must as well very good making a dish of time,” she added, “It isn’t a letters”. /// If you think that sounds like gibberish, you’re right. But it is a pretty interesting type of gibberish because it is generated by a Markov chain. A markov chain (if i describe this correctly, i’m not a mathematician or very good in logic) is an algorithm that makes its next state dependent on the previous one. For example, let’s say you have a text, such as Alice in Wonderland (that’s what the text above is based on). You could scan the whole text, and then look at how many times letters follow each other and make a table of that. E.g., the letter N probably follows the letter A more often than the letter Q. /// After making such a table and start with a random letter, and then make a random weighted decision on the basis of how many times other letters usually follow, you get a text that quite closely resembles the original text, but takes apart all of its original context, resulting in the gibberish you read above. /// It’s quite interesting to program such a markov text generator yourself, so i did exactly that with my PHP Markov chain generator. You can either input the starting text yourself (make sure to make it pretty long for best effect) or select one of the pre-selected texts such as Alice in Wonderland, the Wikipedia article on Calvin and Hobbes or Immanuel Kant’s Critique of pure reason (the last one becomes even more incomphrensible than it already was, can you imagine that?). /// text by Hay Kranen ///