Weaving texts with patterns

Abstract This chapter describes how a statistical information technique, known as Markov Chains, can be employed to generate texts. We introduce concepts like probabilistic distribution, patterns, and generalization. We provide an example that illustrates how this technique works. Employing the short story ‘The Devoted Friend’, by Oscar Wilde, we show how it is possible to generate novel sentences using statistical methods. The chapter continues with some comments about the novel A Noise Such as a Man Might Make written by a computer program using Markov Chains. This program employs data extracted from two novels: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1952, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, published in 2006. We finish with some thoughts about the use of statistical information techniques for text generation.