top | item 362440

Google's Plop is implemented in Lisp

66 points| brewski | 17 years ago |code.google.com | reply

51 comments

order
[+] enomar|17 years ago|reply
Plop appears to be part of a Google-summer-of-code project.

I don't think that makes it a Google product/project. It just means Google paid a student to work on an open source project.

That student appears to have written some of that code in Lisp. Why is that interesting?

[+] moshe|17 years ago|reply
Actually, I work full-time for Google Research (and have written all of the plop code, so far). Google happens to have sponsored a bunch of summer-of-code students through opencog.org, one of whom I supervised, but he coded in C++.

I think that the idea of a Lisp system that learns Lisp programs via probabilistic modeling is intrinsically interesting regardless of who funds it, but that could be personal bias ;->.

[+] axod|17 years ago|reply
if (submission.title.indexOf("lisp")!=-1) submission.voteUp();

surely...

[+] aswanson|17 years ago|reply
That student appears to have written some of that code in Lisp. Why is that interesting?

Yes, I distrust all language zealots and I avoid them. Committment to a language is a lack of integrity.

[+] tlrobinson|17 years ago|reply
So what's it do?

I see a bunch of AI buzzwords.

[+] moshe|17 years ago|reply
Eventually, learn arbitrary programs from data, e.g.

Input: (learn 'fib '(x) '(((1) 1) ((2) 1) ((3) 2) ((4) 3))) Output (defun fib (n) (if (< n 3) 1 (+ (fib (1- n)) (fib (- n 2)))))

as well as standard machine-learning tasks such as supervised classification.

For what it does right now, see the examples at the bottom of the quick start guide:

http://code.google.com/p/plop/wiki/QuickStart

For more technical background see e.g. http://metacog.org/main.pdf (my dissertation). I will also add a list of relevant publications to the wiki...

[+] charrington|17 years ago|reply
This is NOT "Google's Plop" - It is hosted by Google Code, along with thousands of other open source projects. It was part of Google's Summer of Code, as were dozens of other open source projects. Neither of these things make it "Google's."
[+] moshe|17 years ago|reply
But it is! I really am lucky enough to get to do machine learning research at Google and code in Common Lisp!

See http://research.google.com/. Another way you can tell that this is an official Google project is the 'Google' label on the right-hand side of http://code.google.com/p/plop/, which is only added to code developed at Google that has been open-sourced.

Cheers!

[+] loumf|17 years ago|reply
Wouldn't it be pretty odd to see a Lisp framework implemented in some other way?
[+] stcredzero|17 years ago|reply
Plop was the name of another humor comic magazine along the lines of Mad and Cracked. It was on newsstands in the very early 80s.