Mandelbrot

Outro dia li um texto do Morris Halle que mencionava um paper do Mandelbrot (sim, Mandelbrot dos Fractais) e fiquei interessado.

Transcrevo abaixo o texto do Halle:


"In a recent paper B. Mandelbrot has showm that it is impossible to account for the high resistance to noise of speech on the basis of a continuous view. If linguistic messages (utterances) be thought of as continuous, the correction of erros in the reception cannot begin until the entire message is received, which would make correction well nigh impossible, certainly
infinitely more difficult than it actually is. On the other hand, if a discrete view be adopted, correction of errors can begin upon receipt of each discrete unit (quantum), since the discrete units in the language are just a small fraction of all possible things that the ear can receive.

Mandelbrot investigated in detail the consequences of the discrete character of language only on one level, that of words. The necessity for discrete units on the other levels is implicit in his argument. The words themselves are thus viewed as being composed of discrete components, usually known as morphemes, which in turn consist of other discrete units, the phonemes."

(The Strategy of Phonemics, Morris Halle)

Depois de muito procurar na iternet decidi perguntar a algumas pessoas, que haviam citado o artigo, se elas possuiam uma copia digital e poderiam me enviar. Todas foram muito simpáticas, um chinês chegou a se oferecer para scanear e enviar... Acabei achando a versão scaneada escondida no próprio site do Mandelbrot. Pouco depois o Morris Halle me respondeu assim:

"I have no electronic copy of Mandelbrot's 1954 article. Electronic copies did not exist back in 1954."

Deu vontade de responder falando: inventaram o scanner neste meio-tempo, ainda não te apresentaram?

Mas... apenas agradeci e falei que já tinha conseguido localizar e inclusive mandei para ele os links que vão abaixo, caso algum dia alguém também queira ler estes trabalhos.

Logique, Langage et Théorie de L'Information

Structure formelle des textes et communication

An information theory of the statistical structure of language