Markov Chain Norris ~repack~

This was the Norris method: a man as a memoryless process. It was clean. It was mathematical. It was, he believed, the only rational way to live.

Your smartphone keyboard uses similar probabilistic models to guess your next word. markov chain norris

He remembered her at age five, building towers of wooden blocks, then knocking them down with a shriek of joy. He remembered her at fourteen, crying in the kitchen because a boy had called her ugly. He remembered the last fight—the one about her mother, about his emotional absence, about the word conditional used as a weapon. This was the Norris method: a man as a memoryless process

“Yes,” he said. “That is likely a state with high recurrence.” It was, he believed, the only rational way to live

The user provides a starting word, and the Markov Chain begins "walking" through the states, picking the next word based on the probabilities it learned from the original facts.

A great topic!

The rain over Cambridge was the kind that didn’t fall so much as seep—into coats, into bones, into the very margins of notebooks left too long on park benches. Professor Alistair Norris, aged forty-seven, holder of the Chair in Stochastic Processes, stood at the window of his college rooms and watched the students scatter like particles undergoing Brownian motion.