[Haskell-cafe] ANN: bitspeak 0.0.1

[John Meacham]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 06:50:41PM -0300, Maurí­cio CA wrote:
> bitspeak is a small proof of concept application that allows
> writing text using only two commands (yes/no, 1/2, top/down etc.).
> It is intended to show how people with disabilities similar to
> Stephen Hawking's (i.e., good cognitive hability, but very few
> movements) can write text.

There is a parallel between data compression algorithms and this sort of
task, expressing a sentence in the minimal number of bits via
compression also minimized the number of yes/no questions that need to
be asked.

In particular, a Huffman coding:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding
is ideal for this (assuming you just are taking advantage of frequency
analysis). A dynamic Huffman Tree will even adapt as it is being used to
whatever the current language is. Huffman Trees are easy and fun to
implement too.

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈ - http://notanumber.net/