# Claude Shannon Next-Word Generation **Entity class:** Concept **Research spine:** [[research/Chronology of Signals, Silos, and Sovereign Software - Research|Chronology of Signals, Silos, and Sovereign Software]] ## Definition Claude Shannon's 1948 next-word experiment generated text by selecting a word according to conditional probabilities derived from preceding words. ## Chronological Proximity It appeared during the same postwar period in which [[wiki/Fred Terman|Terman]] returned to Stanford and government-funded electronics became a permanent institution. ## Relational Proximity Shannon's manual procedure is a conceptual predecessor to [[wiki/Next-Token Prediction|next-token prediction]], the 2017 [[wiki/Transformer Architecture|transformer]], and [[wiki/GPT-2|GPT-2]]. ## Collection Routes [[collections/The Civilian Intelligence Marketplace|The Civilian Intelligence Marketplace]] · [[collections/Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and the Intelligence Environment|Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and the Intelligence Environment]] · [[wiki/Signals, Silos, and Sovereign Software|Signals, Silos, and Sovereign Software]] ## Sources / Provenance - [[research/Chronology of Signals, Silos, and Sovereign Software - Research|Chronology of Signals, Silos, and Sovereign Software - Research]].