Seriously, why not flip a coin instead of introducing all kinds of bias?
1 Like
Math? In my head? Are you insane?
“Well, Mr Snelgrove, I happen to know that in the future I will not have the slightest use for algebra, and I speak from experience.” 
PSK
I also wrote a little program. I thought there would be close to a 50/50 split between even and odd, and there was when I chose words at random, or short passages. But I was surprised to find when longer passages were used (and I chose passages from several different writers) the split was always around 60% odd, 40% even. There must be some common words used in writing that are odd. This is for Chipmunk Basic:
10 open “/users/gardwitz/desktop/text2.txt” for input as #1
20 text$ = input$(10000,#1)
30 print
40 for char = 1 to len(text$)
50 l$ = mid$(text$,char,1)
60 if l$ = " " or l$ = “.” or l$ = “-” or l$ = “/” or l$ = chr$(10) or l$=chr$(9) then goto 100
70 if asc(l$) >= 97 and asc(l$) <= 122 then v = v+(asc(l$)-96) : word$ = word$+l$ : goto 90
80 if asc(l$) >= 65 and asc(l$) <= 90 then v = v+(asc(l$)-64) : word$ = word$+l$ : goto 90
90 next char
100 if len(word$) = 0 then goto 90
110 print word$ ": " v;
120 word$ = “”
130 if v/2 = int(v/2) then print “even” : v = 0 : e = e+1 : gosub 150 : goto 90
140 print “odd” : v = 0 : o = o+1 : gosub 150 : goto 90
150 if char >= len(text$) then goto 170
160 return
170 print
180 print "Word count: " e+o
190 print "Even: " e " "(e/(e+o))*100 “%”
200 print "Odd: " o " "(o/(e+o))*100 “%”
Edit: But strangely - when I check the words from your link, I get this result:
Word count: 504
Even: 252 50 %
Odd: 252 50 %
So why the 60/40 split with actual writing samples?
Edit again: I think I figured it out. Here’s the top ranked words:
the: 33 odd
of: 21 odd
to: 35 odd
and: 19 odd
a: 1 odd
in: 23 odd
is: 28 even
it: 29 odd
you: 61 odd
that: 49 odd
he: 13 odd
Word count: 11
Even: 1 8.333333 %
Odd: 11 91.666667 %
And top 20 gives 70% odd
Oh and while I’m at it, here’s a little odd music composition of mine using this code modified:
1 Like
DM: Roll for initiative.
ME: She loves me… She loves me not… She loves me …
That’s an interesting idea. But what encoding do you use for a non-roman alphabet, or even a non-alphabetic language?
When I enter “橙汁” for “orange juice” my algorithm breaks.
Counting the number of strokes seems an obvious solution there.
1 Like
Carefully place a coin in your mouth. Using your tongue, flip the coin over several times. Remove the coin from your mouth to see which side is up. There. You have done it.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
