Quick Computer Science Tutorial
Apr 22 2009, 00:51 EDT [updated Apr 22 2009, 01:26 EDT]
My cable info button says that "The Witches of Breastwitck II" is currently available. The title is barely clever: as any good Computer Science student knows punnery can be measured by a title's Levenshtein distance. This is the algorithm that spellcheckers use; it doesn't count soundalikes but instead counts the number of wrong characters and transposition errors (compare and contrast to Hamming distance, another popular measure) between two character strings.
What sounds right to the ear doesn't seem as close to a computer. For instance take The Bare Wench Project and The DaVinci Coed. They both sound about the same but a computer will prefer the later heavily.
NB, no movies were harmed or watched in the making of this post. I just stayed up an hour too late, repeatedly.
PS what I'm actually watching is Deterrence (1999) which is a crazy what-if about nuking Iraq when the president has limited knowledge of a mass destruction attack while he is stuck in a diner while on the campaign trail.