[ih] On queueing from len

[Steve Crocker]

Miaouing, a variant of meowing, has similar structure.

Several decades ago, Vint and I playfully created a small algorithm for
compressing English words in a way that approximated actual abbreviations.
The rules were:

   - Always retain first and last letter
   - Delete a, e, i, o and u except if they're in the first or last position
   - Delete r and n if they're preceded by a vowel and followed by a
   consonant

The above text becomes

Svrl dcds ago, Vt ad I plyflly crtd a smll algrithm fr cmprssg Eglsh wds.
The rls wre:

   - Alwys rtn fst ad lst lttr
   - Dlte a, e, i, o ad u excpt if thy're in the frst or lst pstn
   - Dlte r ad n if thy're prcdd by a vwl ad fllwd by a csnt

It was natural to ask which words compressed the most.  The metric we used
was (l+1)/(L+1), where l is the length after compression and L is the
length before compression.  The "+1" counted the space after a word.

"Queueing" came immediately to mind.  My girlfriend's mother quickly
supplied "miaouing."

Steve


On Wed, Oct 5, 2022 at 4:01 PM Bill Ricker via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> > Some of these guys have happily adopted my “unusual” spelling of
> “queueing”
> > with the extra “e” since I loved the idea of it being the only word in
> > english with 5 vowels in a row (if you spell it the British way, which is
> > why I chose the British spelling).
> >
>
> I am unreasonably pleased that this was intentional Britishism for this
> especially nerdy purpose !
> (Among my harmless sins is using 'perl' extended regular expressions to
> cheat at word puzzles.)
>
> I suspect my mentor MAP having been a STEM-humanities-STEM
> double-cross-over would have appreciated also.
>
> So I guess they read my book
> >
>
> I for one did.
>
> At my first full-time job, we had a weekly brown-bag seminar working
> through the LK QT 2-volume "book".
> (The proofs felt like probability/statistics proofs to me. That's not a bad
> thing, that's more "flavor".)
>
> Our purposes were more for Simulations and Mathematical Modeling of
> physical/social systems than for [IH]-topical reasons; while we were just
> down the street from Project Mac and MIT LCS,  we at DOT TSC† were
> un-networked. I had to walk over to MIT to use an ITS Guest Account to read
> SF-Lovers and the like. (Sneakernet!) We didn't even have local email on
> the TSC PDP-10 running stock DECsystem 10 then.
> (It may have been an option that Systems group hadn't installed? Or not
> shared with the great unwashed of applications programmers?)
> (Hence i hacked up a text-skeuomorphic messaging system using System 1022
> DBMS.)
>
> The networks (in the more general sense of the word) that we were
> interested in better simulating were mostly automotive commuter traffic
> jams.
> (And potentially airport takeoff and landing queues and rail etc., but the
> roadways were more likely to exhibit the most surprising, seemingly
> paradoxical theorems on networks, e.g. Braess's Paradox
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Braess%27s_Paradox&redirect=no
> >
> [1] , mechanically simulated by Steve Mould
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg73j3QYRJc> [2] .)
>
> † (now Volpe Center; i was with SDC A Burroughs Co, onsite contract staff,
> 1980-81; yes that SDC)
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
> [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg73j3QYRJc
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