🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <LAR.90Ma...@pc.usl.edu> l...@pc.usl.edu (Robert Lane A.) writes:
>In article <21...@milton.acs.washington.edu> dig...@milton.acs.washington.edu (Chuck Bigham) writes:
>   In article <1990Feb28.2...@athena.mit.edu> ers...@athena.mit.edu (Ellen R. Spertus) writes:
>   >
>   >My year was one of the first that most of the papers were word
>   >processed.  The teacher told us the department was considering making
>   >students turn in the floppy disk they did their work on.  He couldn't
>   >understand why the students thought this idea was funny.
>
>   Okay, I'll bite.
>   Why was this funny?
>
>It's funny if they wanted the floppy disks to keep the students from
>sharing their work with each other or with students who take the class
>in the future.  Can you say *backup*?  I knew you could. :-)

They could use the floppies to CHECK for copies.  For example, they
input a certain string (from a given report) and search (grep, if you
like) for that string in ALL THE PAST REPORTS.  The reports could
be put on a hard disk for this purpose.  You would have to make sure
you used a suitable search string to get the number of matches
you were looking for (for example, the string "Introduction" probably
would match 90% of the papers, but "Stallings shows that the performance"
might only catch the copies).

Example algorithm:

	for each new paper
		get a 'unique' string from the paper
		for each old paper
			search for 'unique' string in old papers
			report hits for further evaluation
	 	done
	done

For 100 new papers and 1000 old ones, you do have a lot of computer time,
but it could run overnight.

It *is* funny if they only wanted it for the reason you say, but
it could be used as an automated copy-checker.


Steve Casagrande
s...@lzga.att.com