From: Arcadia (arcadia@lynchburg.net)
Date: Tue May 14 2002 - 06:34:10 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "futurefeedforward" <fff@futurefeedforward.com>
To: <arcadia@lynchburg.net>
Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2002 3:23 PM
Subject: Maryland Startup Sequences English Language
>
> May 18, 2023
>
> Maryland Startup Sequences English Language
>
> ROCKVILLE, MD--In a surprise announcement, Lexerica, a
> 23-employee, privately funded startup based in Rockville,
> Maryland, revealed Friday that it has completed an initial draft
> sequence of the English language. "This is a real David and
> Goliath story, a triumph for the little guy with the big idea,"
> exclaims Lucian Blunderbuss, founder, Chairman, and CEO of
> Lexerica. "We tackled the sequencing problem using only a
> fraction of the resources and employee-hours the experts said we
> would need."
>
> The sequence, which consists of "all well-formed and
> near-well-formed expressions possible in the English
> language," was assembled with the help of a network of
> sophisticated computers employing a proprietary
> 'scattershot' sequencing algorithm developed by Blunderbuss
> himself.
>
> "The trick to building the sequence is realizing that it's more
> about figuring out what to include than figuring out what to
> exclude," explains Blunderbuss. "Rather than building a
> database of all mathematically possible sequences of letters
> and then sifting through that for well-formed expressions, we
> took a large set of well-formed expressions, smashed them
> together, and then reformed them, looking for expressions in
> what resulted."
>
> Blunderbuss, once Chief Technical Director of the Public Domain
> Sequencing Project, a publicly funded effort to produce a
> similar sequence, broke with the Project over their reluctance
> to make use of the 'scattershot' technique. "Lucian is
> undoubtedly brilliant," opines Georgiana Jumper, Chair of the
> PDSP executive committee. "And we applaud him for sticking to his
> guns, but the Project continues to have some reservations about
> the technique and the completeness of the sequence it has
> produced."
>
> Organizers of the Public Project also question the propriety of a
> privately funded and privately owned sequence. "The Lexerica
> sequence raises serious questions," notes Pilar Daise, an
> anaphora expert and Project researcher. "While the Project is
> dedicated to increasing the size of the public domain by
> dedicating the sequence to it, the Lexerica sequence, once
> published, could conceivably be the source of copyright claims
> against the bulk of future linguistic expression."
>
> In theory the Lexerica sequence includes, according to Daise,
> "millions of billions of novel-length expressions," each of
> which could conceivably pre-empt the work of a future Hemingway
> or Tolstoy. "It's crucial that the sequence be part of the public
> domain," exclaims Daise. "Otherwise the owner of the sequence
> will have a strangle-hold on future creative work."
>
> Though declining explicitly to dedicate the Lexerica sequence
> to the public domain, CEO Blunderbuss assures critics that his
> company is not interested in owning new expressions. "We have yet
> to fully resolve our business model, but you can rest assured that
> we will not start by suing individual writers. That's just not in
> the cards. Our initial plan is to make the sequence commercially
> available, on a pay-to-use basis. It'll actually be a service for
> writers, who will be able to prospect for new works in the
> sequence, rather than starting from scratch every time."
>
> "We don't really know their plans," notes PDSP Chair Jumper. "It
> is interesting to note, however, that [Blunderbuss']
> scattershot technique relied upon well-formed expressions
> from the public domain. They had to have something to start with."
>
> Acknowledging that the Lexerica sequence did in fact make use of a
> number of public domain works as "seed expressions"--including
> some published early portions of the Public Project's
> sequence--Blunderbuss is quick to point out that Lexerica also
> made use of many "indigenous well-formed expressions,"
> including, notably, three of Blunderbuss' published books,
> transcripts of 133 of his public speeches, and transcriptions of
> more than 1,200 hours of his personal phone conversations.
>
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