Incremental
Many moons ago i and 3 other students were working on an incremental natural language parser based on ideas from our supervisor. Basically, you feed it a sentence: "Hans walks home" and the thing outputs the 'meaning' in some formal language. It was actually pretty cool as most parser are not incremental, that is you dont have 'meaning' until you have parsed the entire sentence.
The problem is that we have one actual programmer on our team. The rest of us have no clue how to put the ideas for the parser into actual code. However, the project is not a fail as this guy really gets into it and writes the whole thing. So by way of thank you and to celebrate the succesful completion of th eproject i and another student decide to bake a cake.
With luck, and help from neighbours and flatmates and stuff bought at the nearby petrol station, we manage to bake a really cool themed cake. You see, you cannot just go around parsing every sentence a person could utter. You start with a context and code the translation for this context. Our context was Hansel and Gretel so our cake was in the shape of a house and decorated with smarties and cookies and all sorts of stuff.
We carefully bring this cake to uni. We only then realise it would be cool to have a picture of our cake. This is around 2000, noone has a camera in their phone.
I bought one of those use-once cameras that you turn in as a whole rather then getting the film out yourself. There is no flash on the cardboard/cheap plastic camera thingy.

I still have the dark, blurred pictures somewhere.

Length? Technically it doesnt matter how long a sentence gets as long as its grammatical. However, you do run out of things to say, in the Hans and Gretel universe.
(bovine intervention, Wed 9 Dec 2009, 23:31, 1 reply)

Now do it in German
where you tend not to know what's going on until the end of the sentence.

I was this cake with strawberries on top one sunny Tuesday afternoon in May eating.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Thu 10 Dec 2009, 2:41, closed)