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It is, in fact, natural to think that man may be a finite-state machine, not only in his function as a message source which produces words, but in all his other behavior as well. We can think if we like of all possible conditions and configurations of the cells of the nervous system as constituting states (states of mind, perhaps). We can think of one state passing to another, sometimes with the production of a letter, word, sound, or a part thereof, and sometimes with the production of some other action or of some part of an action. We can think of sight, hearing, touch, and other senses as supplying inputs which determine or influence what state the machine passes into next. If man is a finite-state- machine, the number of states must be fantastic and beyond any detailed mathematical treatment. But, so are the configurations of the molecules in a gas, and yet we can explain much of the significant behavior of a gas in terms of pressure and temperature merely. Can we someday say valid, simple, and important things about the working of the mind in producing written text and other things as well? As we have seen, we can already predict a good deal concerning the statistical nature of what a man will write down on paper, unless he is deliberately trying to behave eccentrically, and, even then, he cannot help conforming to habits of his own.
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John Robinson Pierce (An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise (Dover Books on Mathematics))