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Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 20:23:03 -0500
From: "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org>
Organization: The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Subject: Re: [lojban] Historical "finprims" gismu algorithm weights and scores
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On 3/3/2014 11:57 AM, Riley Martinez-Lynch wrote:
> Given all of this, I'd like to pose the following questions,
> particularly to those who may be familiar with the genesis of the gismu:

That is me, myself, and I.  No one else did computer runs other than me, 
and I created the finprims document and assigned the gismu.  (although 
my wife Nora did most of the programming).

>  1. Is the finprims document representative of the gismu-making process
>     described in CLL and/or the "1987 gismu-remaking" process? Or were
>     these separate efforts?

yes, "and", not separate, though a few words were added later than 1987 
using later weights

>  2. Can anyone confirm the weights that I derived from finprims, or
>     alternately, identify issues in the methodology I'm using to
>     generate scores?

I'll have to get back to you.  The programs are in TurboPascal 3 (and 
originally were in TP1 or 2) and haven't been run in 20 years or so. I 
vaguely recall that they are correct, and that mamta generated a less 
than 100 score because of rounding errors.

>  3. If these weights are confirmed, is there a record of how were they
>     derived? Have they been previously published?

If there is a record, then I have it.  Finding it may be non-trivial.

>  4. Does anyone with a memory of the gismu-making process remember how
>     decimal precision and rounding was handled in calculating the
>     scores?

Erroneously %^).  There was a bug that we found later that explained the 
mamta numbers adding up to less than 100.

> For example, the letter sequence length scores (2-5) for
>     each input word are divided by the length of each corresponding
>     input word. I'd be curious to know how the precision of these
>     numbers were handled before they were multiplied by the language
>     weighs. I'd also like to know how the precision of the products was
>     handled, before or after they were summed to make the scores.
>
> Thank you for your consideration. I'm enjoying getting to know lojban!

I'm making a guess based on 25 year old memories, but I think we were 
using integer arithmetic because it ran too slow otherwise (my brother 
in law eventually recoded the inside loop in assembler, which sped 
things up by an order of magnitude, but it was still incredibly slow by 
today's standards, 5-100 minutes per source-word trial.)

IIRC, we handled the decimals by shifting two places and dividing the 
total weight by 100, but we were using integer arithmetic which 
introduced some errors.

If you are willing to wade into the old Turbo-Pascal code, I may be able 
to find it and send it to you.  But we may have fixed the bug (deciding 
not to rerun the erroneous ones since the error was a scaling error that 
would change the scores but not likely the resulting order).  I don't 
know if the archived code is that which ran most of the data.  (we 
actually kept track of such things at the time, but no one has asked 
questions like this in 20 years, so I think a lot of old versions have 
been discarded.

lojbab

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