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From: lda@netcom.com (Leonard D Atkinson II)
Subject: Re: Racter
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Date: Sun, 19 Mar 1995 21:20:49 GMT
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I'd like to add that there is an Amiga version of Racter, as well.  It
suffers from a fate similar to the Mac's.  The copy protection tends to
make the game crash under the newer operating systems.  Still, a friend
and I spent many hours reading the ramblings of Racter because they are
humorous.

I've wanted for some time to get my own program running that does what
Racter does.  It is a daunting task.  I tend to approach these things
from a straight-ahead direction, and I think some 'trick' may need to
be employed.  Basically, I was thinking that a story is similar to a
compiled program.  So why not do a BNF of all the elements right down
to the words?  The problem is there's too much to keep track of, I think.

I started looking at doing a sentence generator.  At first it's simple:
<sentence>  ->  <subject phrase><verb phrase>
This is standard stuff in grammar books.  But pretty soon it's hard to
keep track of context.  Maybe this is just a limit of English, but I
would guess it's more a limit of natural language.

I also have considered this algorithm:  scan a document, word-by-word
and replace recognized words with grammatical equivalents.  This is
pretty simple and may produce some amusing texts, but is not as
interesting as Racter.

Anyway, having read the Racter FAQ, I can see that it's a fairly simple
algorithm of just replacing keywords in a body of text.  It is ridiculous
that anyone should pay $200 for something like that.  Perhaps we
should work out the algorithm thoroughly and then code it.  This isn't
really much more than a compiler.

-- 
[X] Leon Atkinson lda@netcom.com
