From Andy Best
I was intrigued to read the statement: “If you want to guess what the 10th word is, the previous nine are of no value”, in your article on interstellar communication (12 July, p 36).
If people are presented with the sentence: “If you want to guess what the 10th word ____”, and told to guess what the 10th word is, I suspect there is a high probability that most would suggest “is”.
I found many more statements in the article where I felt I could predict the 10th word (such as: “The hope is that complexity relates in some way ____”, the word being “to”) but more often than not I couldn’t. So the statement is probably statistically true, even if not actually true to itself.
Waterlooville, Hampshire, UK
