93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019)

Published 2019-04-01.

TLDR: check out the paper and see the gallery of quite Perl programs.

In this paper, we intend to respond to an enduring open issue in the shows languages neighborhood: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without developing legitimate Perl?

We address this concern in the affirmative: it is possible to smear paint on the wall without producing a legitimate Perl program. We utilize an empirical method, utilizing optical character acknowledgment (OCR) software application, which discovers that simply 93% of paint splatters parse as legitimate Perl. We examine the residential or commercial properties of paint-splatter Perl programs, and present 7 examples of paint splatters which are not legitimate Perl programs.

Accepted for publication at SIGBOVIK 2019, held April 1st 2019 in Pittsburgh. Winner of a Unwitting Participation Ribbon, “an undesirable brand name we’ve attached to each paper identified after mindful examination to have actually consisted of a real artifact, consequently advancing the exceptional reasons for open science and productive procrastination.”

Read it on Google Docs or download a PDF. Or get the whole SIGBOVIK 2019 procedures; I’m on page 174.
Supplementary Materials
Here’s all the paint splatters on a single page, together with the legitimate Perl source code representing each. “Not legitimate” is composed in red for those images which did not parse as legitimate Perl programs. If various OCR settings acknowledged numerous legitimate Perl programs, I selected the one that appeared the most “intriguing”, according to my own visual sense.

Here’s a tarball of 100 paint-splatter images that were utilized as the primary dataset for this paper.

(source code not offered yet due to the fact that i am bad at GitHub)

Errata
There are a couple of paint splatter Perl programs that I didn’t acknowledge as “intriguing” up until after the SIGBOVIK submission due date. This splatter is acknowledged by OCR as the string lerzfijglpFiji-jwhich assesses to the number 0 in Perl:

The image listed below is acknowledged as the string -*?which likewise examines to the number 0 in Perl:

Another unexpected program is revealed listed below; OCR acknowledges this image as the string ;i;c;;#?z{;?;;fn':.;which assesses to the string c in Perl:

This image is acknowledged as the string ;E,'__'which examines to the string E__ in Perl: