<nettime> FW: Maryland Startup Sequences English Language

[Bruce Sterling <bruces@well.com>]

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From: "futurefeedforward" <fff@futurefeedforward.com>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2002 13:23:45 -0600
To: bruces@well.com
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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