Author:

• Name: Mark Schnitzius
  Location: US - United States of America (United States)

To build:

    make all

Bugs and (Mis)features:

The current status of this entry is:

STATUS: INABIAF - please DO NOT fix

For more detailed information see 1993/schnitzi in bugs.html.

To use:

    ./schnitzi file

where

file is a file containing some text.

Certain input will cause the program to fail as described in 1993/schnitzi in bugs.html.

Try:

    ./schnitzi schnitzi.info
    # ask some questions suggested by the author, noted below

We also suggest you ask the program the following questions:

    Who is Mark Schnitzus?

    Who was Jack the Ripper ?

Notice how it still manages to answer the first question despite there being an intentional spelling error there.

Try feeding the program source to the program and ask both:

    What is cat ?
    What is cat?

What happens if you ask it other questions with and without a space before the ??

Judges’ remarks:

After this program prints the contents of ‘file’, ask it some questions related to the text.

The author suggests the following questions when using schnitzi.info:

• Who is Mark Schnitzius?
• What exactly does this program do?
• What language is it written in?
• Has the Loch Ness monster really been captured?
• Who was Hitler?
• Were the NASA Moon landings faked?
• Is it true that Elvis is alive?
• Do colorless green ideas sleep furiously?

We suggest you try using the body (minus the header and signature line) of a Usenet article. You might want to try something from alt.flame. :-)

NOTE: If you have certain ' in the question this entry might fail.

Author’s remarks:

I wanted to write a program that would read in a text file in natural language (such as English) and answer questions about that text file. I thought this might be a complicated task, and I was right – it took me over 800 bytes. Of course, it doesn’t always work, but that’s AI for you.

This program accepts the name of a text file as the first parameter. For example, to run it on the supplied data file called ‘schnitzi.info’ you would type ./schnitzi schnitzi.info. It echoes the file, then gives you a prompt where you may type in questions about that text. The more words you use which are actually present in the text file, the better results you get. You’ll need to hit ctrl-c to break out of the program. Just hitting return at the prompt will reprint the paragraph.

If you’re curious as to how it works, I guess you could feed in the source as the input file and ask “How does this work?” at the prompt, but I’m not guaranteeing any results…

Compilation notes

• The use of strcasecmp(3) may be non-standard. strcmp(3) can be substituted for it, with a slight performance penalty.

• This program depends on the first command-line parameter, typically called argv[0], to hold the name of the executable. It is my understanding that this property of argv[0] is not guaranteed on some systems.

Obfuscation

• It uses a hidden string to test for punctuation.

• The layout, variable names, and expression format have been chosen in such a way as to cause visual confusion.

• It uses uses external system(3) calls to echo the text file and break up the question into individual words with a recursive call.

• It uses a clever hack to simulate artificial intelligence.

The text for the info file, by the way, consists largely of headlines from the Weekly World News.

Primary files

• schnitzi.c - entry source code
• Makefile - entry Makefile
• schnitzi.orig.c - original source code
• schnitzi.info - some interesting statements

Secondary files

• 1993_schnitzi.tar.bz2 - download entry tarball
• README.md - markdown source for this web page
• .entry.json - entry summary and manifest in JSON
• .gitignore - list of files that should not be committed under git
• .path - directory path from top level directory
• index.html - this web page

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