The birth of LISP – a summary of John McCarthy’s original paper

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A programming system called LISP (for LISt Processor) has been developed for the IBM 704 computer by the Artificial Intelligence group at M.I.T. The system was designed to facilitate experiments with a proposed system called the Advice Taker, whereby a machine /../ could exhibit “common sense” in carrying out its instructions. /../ LISP  eventually came… Read more »

Natural Language Generation system architectures

Posted by & filed under Le Thesis, Science Wednesday, Uncategorized.

This post is summarized from Chapter 3 of Ruli Manurung‘s An evolutionary algorithm approach to poetry generation from 2003 – it is essentially 10 years old research from a fast moving field of science. However, these are core principles and techniques; a casual perusal of wikipedia indicates they are still valid. If you know of something… Read more »

Web page segmentation

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The Internet talks a lot about article extraction – taking a page and deciding what the real content is. Hell, I’ve written about the Uncanny valley of web scraping myself. Article extraction is such a wide spread problem that a bunch of API’s exist to help you solve it. Everything from a fringe feature in five or ten… Read more »

Comparing automatic poetry generators

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When you write, there’s usually something you want to say. Answer the good old 5W+H at least. Poetry is pretty exploratory though. When you start, you have barely a vague sense on what you’re trying to achieve. You’re conveying emotion rather than meaning. Form matters a lot as well. A lot of creative writing looks like that…. Read more »

Science Wednesday: Defining poetry

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Poetry is a literary form in which language is used in a concentrated blend of sound and imagery to create an emotional response. ~ Levin (1962) Poetry is simple to define –  a poem is a poem because people consider it a poem. Simple. Easy to understand. Useless. When you are studying poetry in a… Read more »

Amazing air machines

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As a computer guy I often forget that there is a whole world out there beyond pictures of cats, big-O and trying to create things that should be impossible. When it strikes my fancy, I sometimes realize there’s also mathematics. But sometimes you come across something so simple, so very much in the realm of… Read more »

Minimum substring cover problem

Posted by & filed under A tech a day, Le Thesis, Science Wednesday.

A major part of my thesisinvolves finding an algorithm to discover a good substring cover of text in order to properly syllabify said text. But what is the substring cover problem anyway and what does it entail? The Minimum Substring Cover Problem paper from Hermelin, Rawitz, Rizzi and Vialette dating back to 2007 (judging by… Read more »

Deca – a cool systems programming language

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This post is a summary of  Eli Gottlieb’s thesis on the Deca programming language from May 2011. In short Deca is a language designed to provide the advanced features of sophisticated, high-level programming languageswhile still programming as close as possible to the bare metal. It brings in the functional, object-oriented and generic programming paradigms without requiring… Read more »