  It is shown that for finding rational approximates to m'th root of any
integer to any accuracy one only needs the ability to count and to distinguish
between m different classes of objects. To every integer N can be associated a
'replacement rule' that generates a word W* from another word W consisting of
symbols belonging to a finite 'alphabet' of size m. This rule applied
iteratively on almost any initial word W0, yields a sequence of words {Wi} such
that the relative frequency of different symbols in the word Wi approaches
powers of the m'th root of N as i tends to infinity
