wombats (was: GLLUG meeting topics)

Matt Graham danceswithcrows@usa.net
4 Apr 2001 22:58:30 EDT


Sean <picasso@madflower.com> wrote:
> On 4 Apr 2001, Ben Pfaff wrote: 
>> Hmm.  That *is* interesting.  But how would you tell the computer
>> to search for a picture of a wombat?
> There is actually a program that does that sort of thing used by graphic
> artists. It is pricey though and I'm not sure exactly how it matches
> stuff.
> Personally I just hope its an eps with a text string in it, so i can do 
>a find by content on the database.

Image recognition is hideously difficult.  We can't even get OCR working
very well currently (though the folks I work for have some ideas...),
and ASCII-like characters on a printed page are far less complex than
the average image.  So I'd say that the program Sean referred to doesn't
work very well, if at all.  Search /. for "porn" and you'll find a story
where some folks claimed to have a net-nanny proxy-type thing that could
detect whether an image was pornographic or not... it didn't work with
any degree of accuracy.
 
And to reply to Ben:  Yes, the line lengths are too long.  I'm damned
lucky this f@#$ing web-mail service will let me wrap the lines of
outgoing messages at all.  That's another reason why I posted recently
about DSL/cable in W.Lansing; I'd like to run my own mailserver and use
mutt+vim for mail and not have to deal with the quoted-unprintable this
thing puts out and such.  Using my work mail, where I do run the
mailserver, is not really an option--separate business from personal,
etcetera.
 
Yes, tar was a bad choice wrt info, but I recall having similar problems
while searching for definitive info on the special mode bits using "info
chmod" many months ago.
 
Anyway, my comment about the wombat picture was not meant to be a search
key, but a recognition key--humans see the wombat on every page of
"Chapter 4: The 10-Layer OSI Burrito Stack", and they make appropriate
associations.  Then when they need information about an obscure
component of level 8 ("Guacamole"), they flail around confusedly for a
bit, remember that there was a wombat by something related to the info
they needed, and refine their search to those pages that have wombats.
A search key is only useful when you either know exactly what you want
or there's a really good fuzzy-matching algorithm on the backend.
(Computers have perfect recall, but horrible fuzzy-matching, while
most people are the other way around.)
 
The ways by which people construct a mental map of their surroundings
(whether physical or informational) are many and varied; it's best to
provide a few different kinds of landmarks in both cases if possible.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
There is no Darkness in Eternity
But only Light too dim for us to see

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