Version history — where it appears
Named by 5 essays across 4 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.
A corpus that was not generated
Every collection in five strands has been copies of a generated text with a fraction of its characters replaced — three numbers, one dial. Here is one that was not — twelve essays, eight source modules, ten revisions of one file — measured beside the model of it.
The shape of a real history's depth
Four essays here are about capping how far an extraction follows a chain of copies, and every number in them came from a generated collection. Here is the depth histogram of a real version history, which is a bell, and of twelve unrelated essays, which is nearly the same bell.
One revision, one level
The cap ladder assumed depth is generations of copying. On a real file it is exactly that — one more revision, one more level, nine times running — plus eight levels the first revision already had before any history existed.
The cap that would ship
The published sweep put the knee at four to eight. On four real collections it is at nine to twelve, a cap of one costs forty-eight times the free parse rather than twenty-one, and the number a system should actually set is none of those.
The dial that has no setting
The generator has one parameter. The real version history's run count asks it for 2.3% and its phrase count asks for 3.2% — and the reason is not that the dial is badly calibrated. Real edits average 7.3 characters a block and generated ones average 1.04.
Named alongside it
The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.
CorpusPhrase countControlGenerated collectionDepthExtractionParseCopyHistogramMeasurementRepetitionRun count