The study was published in the proceedings of SIGBOVIK 2019 after testing 100 scanned images to locate smears that failed to parse. Out of the entire sample, only seven splatters failed to execute as functioning code. When optical character recognition tools generated multiple valid interpretations of a single splatter, the author selected whichever output was considered the most aesthetically interesting. The resulting programs demonstrated a wide variety of operations, producing numeric values, individual characters, and concatenated text.
Key points
Optical character recognition can interpret arbitrary physical markings as functional scr…: Optical character recognition can interpret arbitrary physical markings as functional scripting statements.
The parsed splatters produced varied computational outputs, evaluating to numbers, single…: The parsed splatters produced varied computational outputs, evaluating to numbers, single characters, or text strings.
The project confirmed that while difficult, it is technically possible to smear paint wit…: The project confirmed that while difficult, it is technically possible to smear paint without generating executable syntax.
Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1
Posted 2019-04-01.
TLDR: read the paper and view the gallery of pretty Perl programs.
In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?
We answer this question in the affirmative: it is possible to smear paint on the wall without creating a valid Perl program. We employ an empirical approach, using optical character recognition (OCR) software, which finds that merely 93% of paint splatters parse as valid Perl. We analyze the properties of paint-splatter Perl programs, and present seven examples of paint splatters which are not valid Perl programs.
Accepted for publication at SIGBOVIK 2019, held April 1st 2019 in Pittsburgh. Winner of a Unwitting Participation Ribbon, “an unwelcome brand we’ve affixed to each paper determined after careful scrutiny to have included a genuine artifact, thereby furthering the admirable causes of open science and fruitful procrastination.”
Read it on Google Docs or download a PDF. Or grab the entire SIGBOVIK 2019 proceedings; I’m on page 174.
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