93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs
93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs
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93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs | Colin McMillen
9 comments
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I love SIGBOVIK - truly some insane projects are presented there. Like Tom Murphy's projects of creating a hard drive from pings, or using AI to create uppest and lowest case letters. Or reverse emulating a Nintendo (which is a particular favorite of mine).
One other project that I really love was presented at the 2021 Sigbovik: Fontemon, created by Michael Mulet. It's a full-blown choose-your-own-adventure game in a font. Truly insane. Here's a short video showing the basics of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY1hDQMeU3A
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Aka our OCR software is insanely inaccurate.
It's interesting that mapping random noise to characters via OCR generally produces valid perl... but I always hated how they phrased the title of this experiment since it's obviously bullshit. Essentially, a good interesting experiment made less interesting by a sensationalist title.
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Perl programs are, by definition, text. So "paint splatters are valid Perl" implies that there's a mapping from paint splatters to text.
Do you have a suggested mapping of paint splatters to text that would be more "accurate" than OCR? And do you really think it would result in fewer valid Perl programs?
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“Feeding garbage to OCR” is a really boring way of generating text. I was assuming it would be something more interesting, like creating a symbolic representation of the splatters and generating text from that. Using OCR is basically piping /dev/urandom to perl and seeing what happens. The fact that they’re valid perl programs is worth a laugh but the generation method is totally uninteresting.
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It's whimsical, Leland.
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Whimsical is awesome - but be upfront about what's going on. It's interesting enough without an overly sensational title.
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I think it's okay to relax a little when we're just having a bit of fun.
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9 comments