Got up very, very late today (4:00 pm) after playing
lasertag until 4 am last night then playing on the computer
for a while. Joanna got up around the same time for the same
reason, so to keep ourselves from going back to bed we got
together and made cookies. Yum!
Two nights ago I was at a friend's house and he introduced
me to snoot.org. I like those
kinds of games and diversions. I showed him BillyBot and we
got to talking.. and then he mentioned that it would be neat
to have billy able to generate haikus.
Well, the only way I could figure out to count syllables in
a word without a huge amount of research was to query them
from dict.org and request the web1913 dictionary, which has
a nice, regular-formatted pronunciation guide, and grab it
from that.
This resulted in the following results:
- a python module for interfacing with dictd (rfc2229)
servers (I posted to c.l.p, mail me if you want it)
- a large number of hours waiting for my test program to
grab the syllable counts, during which i realized that if
this is really going into billy, it'll need a
non-cheap-kludge algorithm
- a program which is at this moment spitting out random
haikus every 10 seconds, displayed on my vt220 so everyone
walking into the room can see them.
Thinking about syllable counting made me do a bit of
research; into chatbots and AI and NLP and speach
recognition. I found a great grammar and
parser to study for a good start on billy's next
generator. If I stay as ambitious about this as I feel,
he'll be able to respond to requests (like regular irc bots
do) by NLP rather than regexps. I think that's cool.