FIG. 1.

(color online). Entropy S(m) vs energy E(m) for N = 100 identical and conditionally independent spins. Zipf’s law (E = S) emerges as the standard deviation s ∈ {0.1, 1, 100} of the Gaussian distribution characterizing the hidden variable h is increased. Notice that there is a nearly perfect Zipf’s law for 2 orders of magnitude in s. The mean of q(h) is set to 0, and thus there is a twofold degeneracy between states with magnetization m and −m.