I fed 24 years of my blog posts to a Markov model

Summary

I Fed 24 Years of My Blog Posts to a Markov Model By Susam Pal on 13 Dec 2025 Yesterday I shared a little program called the Mark V. Shaney Junior at github.com/susam/mvs. It is a minimal implementation of a Markov text generator inspired by the legendary Mark V. Shaney program from the 1980s. If you don't know about Mark V. Shaney, read more about it on the Wikipedia article Mark V. Shaney. It is a very small program that favours simplicity over efficiency. As a hobby, I often engage in exploratory programming where I write computer programs not to solve a specific problem but simply to explore a particular idea or topic for the sole purpose of recreation. I must have written small programs to explore Markov chains for various kinds of state spaces over a dozen times by now. Every time, I just pick my last experimental code and edit it to encode the new state space I am exploring. That's usually my general approach to such one-off programs. I have hundreds of tiny little experimental programs lying on my disk at any given time. Once in a while, I get the itch to take one of those exploratory programs, give it some finishing touches, wrap it up in a nice Git repo along with a README.md, CHANGES.md and the whole shebang and share it on github.com/susam and codeberg.org/susam. The Mark V. Shaney Jnr program that I shared yesterday happened to be one such exercise. If you scroll down the README of this project, you'll find some nice examples of the gibberish produced by this program. The first few examples there are the result of training the model on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, one of my favourite authors. It is often said that Dickens never used fewer words when more would suffice. So I thought there couldn't be a better piece of text when it comes to testing out my tiny Markov model. I'll not reproduce the generated text examples here for the sake of brevity. If you are interested to take a look, just head over to the Gibberish Examples section of the READ...