Slopfest #18 · Autumn 1948 · Vienna
The First Language Model
Shannon built fake English out of word statistics. The committee had been doing it in speeches since 1927.
#18Image withheld pending a lawsuit from the Sachertorte people.
Museum status: Insured for more than the building it is kept in.
- Venue
- Café Landtmann, by the newspaper rack
- Attendance
- 177
- Guest of honour
- Claude Shannon (arrived on a unicycle and measured the keynote at 43 bits)
- Fun fact
- 1 speech, 43 bits of information
What happened
The opening speech was assembled by drawing words from a hat, weighted by how often Dr. Kranzl had used them before. It was indistinguishable from his previous speeches. Claude Shannon, who arrived on a unicycle, calculated that it contained almost no information. Kranzl called it deeply moving, and the hat wrote the program for the next four years.
Elsewhere in 1948
Claude Shannon publishes 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication', founding information theory and sampling English from word statistics.
Tip: use ← and → to flip through the archive.