Most humorous output: <...!unido!cernvax!ethz!ovdluhe> Oskar von der Luehe Oskar von der Luehe Institut fuer Astronomie ETH - Zentrum 8092 Zuerich Switzerland Judges notes: Run this program using your favorite text file as input. Files such as mailboxes, man pages and usenet articles are especially recommended. You will get different output each time you run it. Run the program this way: ovdluhe < textfile The program stops when it reaches the end of the template buffer by chance or is killed. Selected notes from the author: This program implements an "Eddington ape" - it generates random text from a supplied template. The template text file is read through stdin. The larger the template, the better the result. A maximum of 2**12 chars are used. From the template, the program calculates the statistics of chars that immediately follow a given string (correlator string) of a certain length (currently 4 - can be varied by changing the definition for P accordingly). A character is randomly chosen, weighted by its probability to occur after the correlator string. That character is printed to stdout and placed at the end of the correlator string, whose first character is discarded. Meaningful words are therefore usually preserved, the effect on sentences can be dramatically random. You might want to vary the definition of P between 2 and 10 and observe the result. Copyright (c) 1989, Landon Curt Noll & Larry Bassel. All Rights Reserved. Permission for personal, educational or non-profit use is granted provided this this copyright and notice are included in its entirety and remains unaltered. All other uses must receive prior permission in writing from both Landon Curt Noll and Larry Bassel.