Let’s work together on a novel! I’ve had in my head a while an idea for a book about man and robot. The robot is a natural language processing automaton, meaning he’s capable of effective human speech comprehension. The human is like any of us; merely something to view the majesty of the universe through.

I was listening to a Cognitect podcast and learned that it’s a good idea to use state machines to develop user interfaces for applications. Since Clojure is a data-oriented language, I figure that it should make for good language to implement that sort of thing. First, however, let’s take a look at what exactly a state machine is, then we’ll dive into the game I’m going to showcase so that it hopefully makes sense why a state machine might be a good abstraction to use for it. NOTE that I’m going to take this all very slowly. There’s a lot of ground to cover, certainly, but I want to cover it all very well.

My aunt Shelly asked me an interesting question about a weight loss competition she competed in. The goal of the competition was to see who could lose the most weight. To those who don’t know, my aunt Shelly doesn’t weigh very much, which means that she started with a major disadvantage. After ending up losing the competition she thought her results were better than the other competitors somehow, so asked me how something like this could actually be calculated better. She wanted to win that competition!

Check out this video if you’re interested. It’s pretty long, but I think gives a pretty good starting point for the mood of this post. It isn’t necessary to watch. I just want to share it.