Fun Stuff > CHATTER
English is weird
Tova:
Genau.
Morituri:
Only the fool would take the trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a's, three b's, four c's, four d's, forty-six e's, sxteen f's, four g's, thirteen h's, fifteen i's, two k's, nine l's, four m's, twenty-five n's, twenty-four o's, five p's, sixteen r's, forty-one s's, thirty-seven t's, ten u's, eight v's, eight w's, four x's, eleven y's, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens, and, last but not least, a single !
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am that fool. It's a perfectly true sentence, but it'd be a lot of work to translate it into other languages.
To be fair, it's not original. It's a literal textbook example used for pedagogic purposes in one of my grad-school textbooks on Search. Yes, "Search" is an entire field of study.
If anyone cares, the sentence above represents one solution of a system of nonlinear discrete equations. Such systems are generally considered insoluble, UNLESS (A) there are many solutions in the search space and (B) the value of each term has consistency constraints against less than half the other terms, and (C) the number of possible values each variable can take is expected to be less than n*log(n) of the number of variables. If these things are true, then a system of nonlinear discrete equations can be solved (or at least one of the solutions can be found) using an obscure algorithm called Cycle Search.
Cycle Search is not usually implemented even in databases or advanced mathematical packages, because people don't understand the constraints on its usability and when they try to use it on problems that don't meet the constraints it diverges hard. Besides, solving such systems is considered bizarre and likely to be useless for any practical purpose. They are far more likely to implement a loosely-related algorithm called the RETE algorithm. RETE is usable on a set of problems considered far more practical and valuable, and doesn't require the variable values to be numeric. It could in theory be used on problems like the above, but the RETE algorithm diverges hard on nonlinear cases and would take until well after the sun burns out to find a solution to this.
A sentence like the above is a "small" instance of such searches. If you are sufficiently OCD, you can do it on paper, by hand (translate that sentence into another language) in about a week with less than 500 pages of paper to work on. Which is about the same amount of time it takes a good programmer to correctly implement Cycle Search, so it's pretty much a break-even case. If a problem the same size as the above had only one solution, it could, in theory, eventually be found using Cycle Search, but it might take several centuries of computer time. Not as bad as RETE, but in a one-solution case, pretty bad.
flfederation:
--- Quote from: Morituri on 19 Oct 2020, 09:40 ---Only the fool would take the trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a's, three b's, four c's, four d's, forty-six e's, sxteen f's, four g's, thirteen h's, fifteen i's, two k's, nine l's, four m's, twenty-five n's, twenty-four o's, five p's, sixteen r's, forty-one s's, thirty-seven t's, ten u's, eight v's, eight w's, four x's, eleven y's, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens, and, last but not least, a single !
--- End quote ---
It's really not much trouble:
--- Code: ---echo "Only the fool would take the trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a's, three b's, four c's, four d's, forty-six e's, sxteen f's, four g's, thirteen h's, fifteen i's, two k's, nine l's, four m's, twenty-five n's, twenty-four o's, five p's, sixteen r's, forty-one s's, thirty-seven t's, ten u's, eight v's, eight w's, four x's, eleven y's, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens, and, last but not least, a single !" | fold -sw 1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
--- End code ---
74
47 e
41 s
38 t
28 ,
25 n
23 o
23 '
16 r
16 f
14 i
14 h
11 y
10 u
10 a
9 l
8 w
8 v
7 -
5 p
4 x
4 m
4 g
4 d
4 c
3 b
2 k
1 O
1 !
Add an "i" to make 15 instead of 14 though, if you fix "sxteen". And don't worry, the tally is correct-- only the entry of the word is not.
N.N. Marf:
--- Quote from: flfederation on 19 Oct 2020, 10:26 ---
--- Quote from: Morituri on 19 Oct 2020, 09:40 ---Only the fool would take the trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a's, three b's, four c's, four d's, forty-six e's, sxteen f's, four g's, thirteen h's, fifteen i's, two k's, nine l's, four m's, twenty-five n's, twenty-four o's, five p's, sixteen r's, forty-one s's, thirty-seven t's, ten u's, eight v's, eight w's, four x's, eleven y's, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens, and, last but not least, a single !
--- End quote ---
It's really not much trouble:
--- Code: ---echo "$that_sentence" | fold -sw 1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
--- End code ---
--- End quote ---
You didn't really go through all the trouble, your computer did. The question becomes whether your computer is the fool. According to "$that_sentence", he would be.
Gyrre:
--- Quote from: Morituri on 20 Sep 2020, 20:43 ---Why do people call the Republicans the "GOP"? There's not a single "grand" thing about them.
But there is one remarkable characteristic that stands out: We could call them the "OWP" because every last one of their senators are Old White People.
--- End quote ---
I always figured it was meant as a tongue in cheek sort of thing once they got co-opted by rich industrialists and started getting corrupted.
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8VOM8ET1WU
--- Quote from: hedgie on 20 Sep 2020, 22:48 ---Government Of Putin
Greedy Old Pædophiles
--- End quote ---
Sorry Hedgie, but they don't have a monopoly on that one. Granted there are more of them on Epstein's leaked client list. WhichI rather hope everyone looks through while voting in their state's run-off elections. There's a Reddit thread for it.
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