“This is a time of suspicion, a time when the past seems to penetrate the walls of Collinwood.”

I’m taking the week off so that I can test-drive some exciting new sedatives, but I don’t want to leave you unsupervised all week. You might get up to all kinds of mischief, who even knows. So I’ll tide you over with some strange bits of business that would never fit in a regular post.

Today, let’s talk about Markov chains. Andrey Markov was a Russian mathematician in the late 19th century, who came up with a way to describe systems with no memory — where the next thing that happens is only dependent on the current state, rather than what happened in the past.

You figure out how often the process moves from A to B, compared to when it goes from A to C, and then you can use probability to generate a “Markov chain” — a sample run-through of the process. This is useful in math, and physics, and other smart-people areas.

An amusing but not at all useful application of this idea is a Markov chain text generator. You can put a whole bunch of sentences into the generator — like, for example, the opening narrations for Dark Shadows episodes. Then the generator starts with a random word from the input text, and calculates what word is most likely to come next. Then it does the same with the next word, and so on. You end up with text that sounds like the original, but doesn’t actually mean anything.

So I’m going to input every opening narration from episode 210 through 650 into the Markov generator, to see if we can discover the perfect Dark Shadows introduction. Here we go.

Continue reading X4: An Uncertain and Frightening Journey →