Thursday, September 4, 2014

MakerSquare Day 6: Johannes Gutenberg, master of algorithms (2/2)

We did a little more work today on our puppy-breeder classes, but it was nothing compared to our new and fabulous (for me) algorithm assignment: we had to write a program that would take in a set of books from Project Gutenberg and would tell us the genre! Now, if you've ever talked to me before, you know I'm a huge nerd for genre, trying to find the weird edge-cases between science fiction and fantasy and other genres of novels.

This was not that kind of genre test.

We were given a batch of books that we knew were either astronomy, philosophy, physics, or religion. We had to write a program that would take those books and those categories; and then apply what it had "learned" to some other books which did fit into one of those programs.

Which is kind of a perfect intersection of my grad school career studying English and my new career.

So, ahem, bragging alert. Awoo. Awoo.

By lunch time, I had reached 100% with a time hovering around the 6-8 second mark.

[Edited to add: Since then I have had a friend run it on her newer computer and it runs around 3-4 seconds.]

Bragging alert off.

[Edited to add: Especially because the next day, people had come up with versions that were faster than mine. Still, it was nice to have the earliest complete version.]

The rest of the day was dedicated to our puppy breeder classes; and more specifically, to learning how to use a database to store information. Which was super abstract and not at all like the fun I was having with the Gutenberg project. Though maybe I was the only one who found Gutenberg fun.

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