Regex Golf, xkcd, and Peter Norvig

mikejuk writes "A recent xkcd strip has started some deep academic thinking. When AI expert Peter Norvig gets involved you know the algorithms are going to fly. Code Golf is a reasonably well known sport of trying to write an algorithm in the shortest possible code. Regex Golf is similar, but in general the aim is to create a regular expression that accepts the strings in one list and rejects the strings in a second list. This started Peter Norvig, the well-known computer scientist and director of research at Google, thinking about the problem. Is it possible to write a program that would create a regular expression to solve the xkcd problem? The result is an NP hard problem that needs AI-like techniques to get an approximate answer. To find out more, read the complete description, including Python code, on Peter Norvig's blog. It ends with this challenge: 'I hope you found this interesting, and perhaps you can find ways to improve my algorithm, or more interesting lists to apply it to. I found it was fun to play with, and I hope this page gives you an idea of how to address problems like this.'"

Comments

Regex this

[BringsApples]

Ok, mod me troll, but...
Regex me a list of folks that have time to sit around fucking off their life-time in order to write a regex to work on the XKCD "problem", and folks that don't. And for the folks that are working on this, is this one of those things that you need 2 monitors for? I mean honestly, who in the hell has time to fuck off like this, and why? If you were going to school for coding, and your teacher gave you this as an assignment, I imagine that it'd be one of those things that you'd gripe about 'having' to do, and how stupid it is - a waste of time. And you'd be right.

xkcd is terrible!

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy shit, nerds. xkcd is universally terrible and you're all garbage people for constantly sucking its dick. Grow up.