Balance Of Probability

Back in college I co-authored a paper entitled “A Probabilistic View of Certain Weighted Fibonacci Sums” (available here). Looking back on it, I wonder if that particular combination of words had ever been used together before. Contrast that to a sentence like “Could you go to the store and pick up some milk?” Certainly that combination of words has been used many times.

All this was brought to mind after I uttered the following this morning:

“For the purposes of our system, both syntactic and semantic errors should cause input to be rejected as malformed.”

Do you think that sentence has ever been uttered before? What about your average everyday statement? How might we go about analyzing such a thing? It’s these questions that will kick off my first significant blog series, “The Tyranny Of The Finite”, which I hope to start next week.

Until then, today’s challenge is to go out and use a sentence that is unlikely to have ever been said before.