Both curves fall, and one of them is a shuffle

Both curves fall, and one of them is a shuffle

Phrases per character against the size of the collection, on a million characters of prose. The lower line is the text; the upper is the same characters in a random order, which holds the length, the alphabet and the zeroth-order entropy exactly fixed and destroys only the arrangement. The text falls by a factor of 2.34 between 8,192 characters and 1,004,741 — and the shuffle falls by 1.70, because the phrase count of any text is about n over its logarithm. Every measurement this collection published about real prose was taken at 24,576 characters, at the left-hand end of both curves.

Drawn at 700 × 420, wide on the page. Everything above is what corpus-scale returns with no arguments; the caption is the generator's own, computed from the numbers in the drawing rather than written beside it.

2 essays call corpus-scale. The drawing above is what it returns with no arguments at all; every call below passes it something, because a placement that passes nothing draws whichever member of the family the generator happens to default to rather than the one its essay argues about — which is what optcheck and figfill exist to catch.