Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Regular expression
It's extremely fascinating to see the differences between artificial and natural languages. Given the often times unnecessarily cumbersome and ostentatious feel of the rules English, I often find myself appreciating the sublime beauty found in the simplicity of artificial languages. As I begin work on assignment 3, I find it striking how powerful a tool regular expressions can be. I found the concept a bit confusing in lecture, specifically when proving facts about languages, but having worked through a few examples from class i'm beginning to become more confident about the, Having experimented with Regular expressions for searching through text files for the upcoming 207 exercise, i'm beginning to wonder how I ever lived with the incredibly bare bones default find function. If artificial intelligence ever becomes truly self aware, it's comforting to know that their superior powers of communication will help them subjugate our race.
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3 comments:
But, if those AI beings want to say "find all the binary numbers with an even number of zeros and an odd number of 1s" they'll have to work harder than we do.
I think what you're finding is that the meaning of regular expressions really sinks in once you're using them. I should probably work in more in-class exercises.
Interestingly enough I'm looking at very similar debate for a cognitive science essay I have to write. Although I'll accept that computers make rather poor heuristic driven problem solvers, by the time there overthrowing and enslaving us I'm sure they'll have worked out a few method for it.
I think more in class exercises would be greatly beneficial as I find that the method, purpose and overall usefulness of most topics become clearer when we start breaking down increasingly complex examples.
Hahaha
I wholeheartedly agree with you - simple and mathematical is beautiful when put next to unwieldly and ostentatious english. Damn these natural languages and they're rules. [expletive] ... [expletive]
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