The Philosophaster

philosophaster

\Phi*los"o*phas`ter\, n. [L., a bad philosopher, fr. philosophus: cf. OF. philosophastre.]
A pretender to philosophy. [Obs.]
--Dr. H. More.

The program behind this page is a simple Perl script inspired by the ChomskyBot, an ingenious prose generator written by Anthony Aristar, John F. Sowa, John Lawlor, Kevin McGowan, and others (see http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/foggy.faq.html for some of the details). See if the output doesn't remind you of someone you've known.

Each utterance of the Philosophaster consists of ten sentences, and each sentence consists of four phrases -- an introduction, a subject phrase, a verb phrase, and a conclusion, in most cases an object phrase. There are 40 of each in the data files that the program uses. Since each phrase is chosen randomly and independently, the number of possible first sentences is

40⁴ = 2,560,000

The second sentence cannot use any of the phrases used in the first sentence, so the number of possible second sentences is

36⁴ = 1,679,616

The third sentence cannot use any of the phrases used in either of the first two sentences, so the number of possible third sentences is

32⁴ = 1,048,576

For the remaining sentences the numbers are

614,656,
234,256,
104,976,
38,416,
10,000,
1,296, and
16,

respectively.

So the number of possible different paragraphs is enormous -- 1.3 followed by 50 zeroes!