I don't like titles that start with "unzipping" - it is triggering to marginalized populations. It reminds me of that one time at band camp that "Dr." Fauci came up to me and unzipped his pants.
This is very nice. All the time I studied linguistics people were saying that "nobody knows why Zipf's law is obeyed", but now there's at least an believable explanation.
Zipf distributions show up in randomly generated character sequences, Semantics are orthogonal.
Zipf thought it was the principle of least effort, the use of language to minimize size of communication and maximize meaning. This heuristic causes the use of language to approach some ideal optimal communication, which subsequently shows up in statistics as Zipfy.
The underlying reason is something rooted in information and complexity theory, and will depend on Kolmogorov complexity and systems modeling.
To quote vsauce: "...Moreover, Zipf's law doesn't just mysteriously describe word use. It's also found in city populations, solar flare intensities, protein sequences and immune receptors, the amount of traffic websites get, earthquake magnitudes, the number of times academic papers are cited, last names, the firing patterns of neural networks, ingredients used in cookbooks, the number of phone calls people received, the diameter of Moon craters, the number of people that die in wars, the popularity of opening chess moves, even the rate at which we forget."
Semantics and syntax are dependent on Kolmogorov complexity, so if you loosen the definitions to use the rules of any given system as syntax and the relationships between atomic units over time as semantics, you could possibly derive a formula that answers the question of what Zipf's law actually is, insofar as there's some universal rule that governs the distributions of units within systems that have entropy.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 22.8 ms ] threadI told him "No! Dr. Fauci my name is not Snoopy!"
and similar in spirit (but different) and perhaps better known, Benford's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
Zipf thought it was the principle of least effort, the use of language to minimize size of communication and maximize meaning. This heuristic causes the use of language to approach some ideal optimal communication, which subsequently shows up in statistics as Zipfy.
The underlying reason is something rooted in information and complexity theory, and will depend on Kolmogorov complexity and systems modeling.
To quote vsauce: "...Moreover, Zipf's law doesn't just mysteriously describe word use. It's also found in city populations, solar flare intensities, protein sequences and immune receptors, the amount of traffic websites get, earthquake magnitudes, the number of times academic papers are cited, last names, the firing patterns of neural networks, ingredients used in cookbooks, the number of phone calls people received, the diameter of Moon craters, the number of people that die in wars, the popularity of opening chess moves, even the rate at which we forget."
Semantics and syntax are dependent on Kolmogorov complexity, so if you loosen the definitions to use the rules of any given system as syntax and the relationships between atomic units over time as semantics, you could possibly derive a formula that answers the question of what Zipf's law actually is, insofar as there's some universal rule that governs the distributions of units within systems that have entropy.
https://youtu.be/fCn8zs912OE