Random Character Sequences Do Not Follow Zipf's Law

number of different letters for random sequence

N

2

text

Origin of Species

Alice in Wonderland

Hamlet

Faust I

US Constitution

	random sequence
	real text

This Demonstration shows that word frequencies [1] in random character sequences and real texts behave differently from the point of view of Zipf's law. (For random character sequences, a word means the smallest unit separated by blanks.) Data exhibiting Zipf-like behavior shows a roughly linear relationship between frequency and rank on a log-log plot.

We consider only one random sequence model. All characters, including the blank or space are equally likely. This model is specified with a single parameter,

N

, the number of characters other than the space.

N∈{2,4,6,26}

was used in [2] (as mentioned in [1]). In this Demonstration, you can select

N

between 2 and 26.