Mesmerizing Movement

Nathan Yau of Flowing Data has put together an enthralling dynamic display of a Markov Chain of 1000 points simulating US Americans as they move through activities during their day. Color indicates activity and as this activity changes, the points move to another cluster. At rush hours and lunch there is a flurry of movement as points move from home, work, eating, leisure, etc. Leisure collects most points in the early evening, until late at night when most end up in a large yellow sleeping cluster on the right. It's captivating to watch the swirl of activity but also hard to follow anything but the biggest patterns of movement. To address this he also has static views of the paths the points take.

Eating, work, housework, and even leisure dominate this lunch hour view. See more here.

Markov Language

From prooffreader.com  is an interactive color-coded matrix of transition probabilities from any given letter on a row to its following letter in a column. For example, along the row beginning with the letter "h", the darkest hue, represents the highest probability (47.42%), is for the letter that most likely follows, which is "e".

The most likely letter to follow "d" is "-", indicating that the most likely choice is no single letter, but instead "nothing". So that "d" most likely is at the end of a word.

There is a similar graphic of reverse transition probabilities, showing letters that most likely precede a given row choice.

It would be fun to simulate how words would behave when primed with this limited behavior of English. We could use our last post and these graphics of letter transition probabilities to simulate a "Markov language".