What's My Plot, Episode 3
A couple of months ago, I asked about this plot, and promptly forgot about it.
OK, twitter: you know the drill: I plotted something, and you’ve got to guess what it is. For the third time: what’s the plot? (Postcards for responses I deem to be the winners.) pic.twitter.com/nwiKK3pCfT
— Colin Beveridge (@icecolbeveridge) June 23, 2021
This wasn’t a great What’s My Plot, in honesty. The broad class of thing was far too easy to recognise, but the specific thing far too hard.
I think the best response was by @realityminus3:
Astrophotography of distant galaxy on nine occasions (three of which feature lens cap mishaps)
A postcard is on its way.
Honourable mentions to @tpfto (“Those look awfully like plots of two-dimensional distributions”) and @ashwinvis (“Correlation between two 2nd order symmetric tensors?”), both on Mathstodon.
What it was
- I split the text of Moby-Dick up into roughly-tweet-sized messages
- I counted how many times each bigram, trigram and quadgram of letters occurred
- I calculated the implied log-probability of the bigrams, trigrams and quadgrams in each message
- I binned the results from each and made a contour plot of how the various n-gram probabilities correlate.
Can’t believe nobody got it, tbh.
Stay tuned for another episode of What’s My Plot? at some future point!
* Thanks to my good friend Matt for reminding me I hadn’t given an answer to this!