interesting commentary on software pattern matching and literature.
http://links.techwebnewsletters.com/...TkS1&mt=1&rt=0
exerpt: Pattern matching is one thing computers do really well. Take a bushel of data, throw it at a computer, and be amazed by the results. That's more or less what Sebastian Bernhardsson, Luis Enrique Correa da Rocha, and Petter Minnhagen, all members of Sweden's Umea University Department of Physics, did anyway. What is particularly interesting about their data was that it was a collection of books by Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and Herman Melville — authors I haven't thought much about since university.
And what the researchers discovered was that by applying statistical analysis and pattern matching techniques to literature written by these authors, they were able to identify unique literary "fingerprints" of each author......
See link above for full text.