What a score is

So what kind of number is a score? Not a percentage, and on its own it means very little.

Back to The octopus opened the ... Suppose jar scores 3.6, lid scores 2.4, box scores 0.8, and the fragment ievable scores -2.7.

Negative scores are perfectly normal, and they are not a sign that anything has gone wrong. A score only means something next to the other scores. Higher means the model favours that token more, and that is the whole of what it tells you. On its own, 3.6 is not a quantity of anything.

Which is a problem, because you cannot pick a token out of numbers like these. 3.6 against 2.4 gives you an order, but no sense of how much more likely the first one is, and no way to leave room for the second to win occasionally.

So there is one more step, and it turns these scores into something you can actually draw from.