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Original Usenet thread from alt.ascii-art, started 16 Aug 1999.
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Does anyone know what the duck this guy's on about??!

Does anyone know what the duck this guy's on about??!

alt.ascii-art · 1 message · 16 Aug 1999
The Super Happy Karate Monkey <ton...@aol.commander> wrote in message
news:199...@ng-co1.aol.com...

> Do you (or anyone else) know where I can get a program like this? It sounds
> like fun. I just searched the web for Markov Chain and I got WAY to many
> responses. Thanks.

A program similar to this is NIALL.  This was origianlly an AMOS program on the
Amiga, but has been ported to the PC.  EMail me for a copy.  Here is an
explanation of how it works.

-----

Niall attempts to learn English, or whatever language you care to teach it, by
breaking down the sentences you type in, remembering words, connections between
words, the number of times a particular connection has occurred, and start/end
sentence markers.

The best was to explain is by example. Suppose the first sentence you typed was:


The large green tree was next to the old red shed
Niall would split the sentence into separate words and store any new words it
found (Niall's vocabulary is initially blank!). It would then store the
following information:


The word THE can begin a sentence.
The word LARGE can follow the word THE.
The word GREEN can follow the word LARGE...etc.
The word SHED can end a sentence.
Therefore after analysing this sentence, Niall has learnt 10 new words and knows
that the word THE can not only start a sentence by also join onto both LARGE and
OLD. This can be expressed as follows:


       /----------<---------------<----------------<----------\
(Start)\-THE --- LARGE -- GREEN -- TREE -- WAS -- NEXT -- TO--/
     \
      \--- OLD --- RED --- SHED(End)

Niall then replies to your sentence by picking a random word which can begin the
sentence, followed by one of the words which can join onto it selected at
random, then one which can join onto it, and so on until the end of sentence
marker is reached. Therefore, Niall may reply to your first sentence like so:

The old red shed.
The more sentences you type in the more words Niall will learn, the more
connections it will make and the more original the replies will seem. Replies
must be taken with a pinch of salt since the grammar will be anything but
perfect. A semi intelligent version which attempts to learn grammar too, may
appear at a later date.

Niall also remember the number of times a particular connection is made in order
to weight the replies and make them sound more realistic. For example, if the
second sentence you type is:


The old garden gate was blue
Niall now knows that the word THE joins onto the word OLD more often than it
joins to LARGE. The table above now looks like this:


       /----------<---------------<----------------<----------\
(Start)\-THE --- LARGE -- GREEN -- TREE -- WAS -- NEXT -- TO -/
    \\                            /  /
      === OLD - RED - SHED (End) /  -BLUE (End)
       \                 /
        - GARDEN - GATE-/

Niall could now reply:

The old garden gate was next to the old red shed.
To look at the vocabulary that Niall has built up, select `View Dictionary' from
the File menu. If you had typed in the two sentences above, then the output
would look like this:


   0: > 2| 1(2)
   1: the 3| 8(2) 2(1)
   2: large 1| 3(1)
   3: green 1| 4(1)
   4: tree 1| 5(1)
   5: was 2| 13(1) 6(1)
   6: next 1| 7(1)
   7: to 1| 1(1)
   8: old 2| 11(1) 9(1)
   9: red 1| 10(1)
  10: shed 1| -1(1)
  11: garden 1| 12(1)
  12: gate 1| 5(1)
  13: blue 1| -1(1)

Word 0 (>) is an empty word which is used to start the sentence. The 2| means
that there are 2 possible next words, and the 1(2) means that both those
possibilities are word 1 (The). The word -1 (as in `13: blue 1| -1(1)') means
end-of-sentence.

-----

Also you might like to check out Dadadodo at http://www.jwz.org/dadadodo/ which
is a CGI script (plus downloadable source code) which will chuck out a load of
this splurge.



This is, er, a troll of some sort.


   \\||//
  `.\||/.'
  ---..---
  '/(oo)\`
   __)(__
  (      )
  | Y  Y |
  |/    \|
  (  .   )
 -`. y  .`-
 /|| |  ||\
   ( (  |
   | |  |
 _.'.'  |
Ooo_Ooo_)



--
    <\_________________________________________
   // ||          Andrew Carpenter             \
  ||  || news @ gloucestershire.freeserve.co.uk \
  ||  ||          ICQ : 20885021                 \
  ||gj||\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
  ~~~~~~

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