https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1209.1179/Collected HN comments and submissions linking this paper.enMon, 02 Nov 2026 11:16:22 GMThttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19514383urn:hackerpapers:mention:1209.1179:19514383Thu, 28 Mar 2019 17:22:53 GMT<p>Shannon observed this in his work towards information theory. Humans are able to predict next letters in a stream of natural language with a probability approaching optimal. The original paper is here: https://www.princeton.edu/~wbialek/rome/refs/shannon_51.pdf The summary at wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)#E... Notably, PPM, the best compression algorithm (at the time), was not able to predict as well. So that&#x27;s a quantitative demonstration of optimality in language performance that includes a faculty for understanding syntax and semantics and presumably…</p><p><a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1209.1179/">Paper and discussion history</a>. A mention is not an endorsement.</p>physics.bio-ph