"How fast can you count the characters in this sentence?" Chunk them into 5's? Raw addition? Sorting? etc. What's your best method to count that sentence as quickly as possible? I think a test like this might show the intelligence of a forum. Is an ant to an ant colony as a member is to a forum?
The fastest method, although not necessarily the most accurate, would be by clumping them into noticeable groups. The number within each group would vary from clump to clump. It would all depend on what draws your eye. The same sort of technique is useful for counting any large group of objects. Cattle, flowers, mongol horde, etc.
Chunking is my intuition too On the other hand, holism and reductionism can also be regarded as complementary viewpoints, in which case they both would be needed to get a proper account of a given system." - wiki || ||| |||| |||| |||||| ||| |||||||||||| ||| |||| || |||||||| || ||||||||||||| |||||||||| || ||||| |||| |||| |||| ||||| || |||||| || ||| | |||||| ||||||| || | ||||| ||||||| - wiki For 'reductionism', the second example is much harder to count. I believe things with unique identity are easier to count quickly. You can instantly tell they are the same paragraphs
here look how simple it is in C: Code: #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> #include <stdlib.h> void main() { char c; int i=0; do { c=getchar(); i++; } while (c != '\n'); printf("%d\n",i); }
How about instead of enumerating the characters sequentially, writing a program to count it some other way? Once I count a word that's 5 letters I can identify other 5 letter words just by their size and my intuitive feeling.
I guess you could just have variables get plugged the 1st time the computer encounters a word with 1 character .. 2 chars, 3 chars and so on, in a rectangle with the corresponding width. And from then on put down the matching boxes. It would just look at the whole paragraph instead of each letter.
maybe an array of chars or something-i didnt gave it a lot of thought-as long as the complexity is around logn its ok.
