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From: Markus Gebhard <ukgh@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de>
Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art
Subject: ASCII Art Game/Tool (was: Hey, LastFuture)
Date: Sun, 06 May 2001 13:26:43 +0200
Organization: University of Karlsruhe, Germany
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Hi,

I was very busy during the last two weeks but I read all your postings
to this subject. I really don't understand what you are talking about.
  You are discussing about what programming language to use, about what
operating system the program shall run on etc. But it seems to me that
nobody here knows what the program shall do at all.

At first it was about the fun of puzzling 'shaked' Ascii art
You have this one:
   .-. .-.
(   `   )
    `.   .�
`.�
And after moving around the lines it will result in:
 .-. .-.
(   `   )
 `.   .�
   `.�

So shall the program simply be a tool that shakes the lines of Ascii
Art, so it becomes kind of a puzzle? Then the program is a game and it
is very simple to write it (it will take me 5 minutes to integrate it
into Jave - if you are interested in it).

Then came the idea of doing it all the other way around. You have
somehow crippled Ascii Art like:
______   ______     ______    __
 /      | /  __  \   /  __  \  |  |
     |  ,----'|  |  |  | |  |  |  | |  |
      |  |     |  |  |  | |  |  |  | |  |
|  `----.|  `--'  | |  `--'  | |  `----.
             \______| \______/   \______/  |_______|
And the program tries to fix it:
  ______   ______     ______    __
 /      | /  __  \   /  __  \  |  |
|  ,----'|  |  |  | |  |  |  | |  |
|  |     |  |  |  | |  |  |  | |  |
|  `----.|  `--'  | |  `--'  | |  `----.
 \______| \______/   \______/  |_______|

So the program is a tool and it is quite hard to write it, for one has
to find out when an Ascii art image is correct or not. (For example you
have to find a way to compute the degree of possible correctness to a
given image and then only have to try to maximize this value by movin
around the lines). That could work with some images, but it will not be
possible to write such kind of tool to be able to work on images like:

.,    \                   <- Try to fix this line.
     _.=./ "\.   G        How shall a computer do that? 
   .'  ~  /`" \/(#)\.
  ~ |_ _( )     / \/
    |:  | |     |||
    '   ` '     Z L
a:f

So the first question that has to be answered is:
-+--------------------------+-
 | What is the program for? |
-+--------------------------+-

The second question is NOT the programming language or operating system.
It is:

-+--------------------+-
 | How shall it work? |
-+--------------------+-

For those questions it is very useful to have examples (like the ones
above). Then one can try to write down some kind of algorithm like:
  
  for each line in the image:
    remove empty characters on the left
  find maximum length of a line (max)
  find minimum length of a line (min)
  ...

And when that is done someone can write a first program (in any language
he likes). If it works it is no big deal to convert it to other
languages/systems.

Now who is going to answer the first question?

Markus