(DEFUN COOL_PROJECT (PROJECT_NAME) T)
Entry posted by Makoto_the_Phoenix
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Okay. You're probably not going to understand the entry title. But this will also (partly) explain where the heck I've been for the past week.
LISP is a functional programming language centered around processing lists, hence, List Processing. The primary thing you work with are lists, which are structured in parenthesis. Everything is a list.
So I have a cool project (which, with technical difficulties, I wasn't able to submit on time), regarding LISP - English Sentence Generation. Basically, what it does is take several lists of different types of words (nouns, pronouns, conjunctions, adverbs, adjectives, etc), and builds sentences around it.
Admittedly it's rough around the edges, but since it's not quite ready yet, this one I did find amusing:
[26]> (GENONE)
(THE FRANTIC MICE FRANTICALLY WATCH ON THE EXHAUSTED DESKS)
And no, it's not set up to do that automatically. Quite frankly, it's a good spot of luck (since it's actually pseudo-randomly determined as to what value comes out of the list).
If you're curious, the cardinality (the number of potential combinations of each sentence) is well over 9 billion - I'll get a real number to give you guys later, but I have a feeling it'd overflow Java longs.
There's other stuff to do with LISP - namely it's used heavily in the field of Artificial Intelligence, which makes sense - it can be taught to rewrite itself (EVAL)*. If you're curious about this, look it up.
...Other stuff has happened to me this week, but it's less interesting than programming projects. Perhaps next time, I'll outline my larger, private, open-source project. Wait, those last two are an oxymoron, right? Well, we'll see, won't we? ;)
*: Technically, anything that has the ability to execute code either generated or parsed on the fly can be used in A.I., but LISP is probably the best (and most venerable) for the job, anyway.
Midnight edit:
Break 1 [3]> (genone)
(THE THREE DEVIOUS DOGS ANGELICALLY DRINK ON THE SAXOPHONES)
God, I love pseudo-random number generators.
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