A Man, a Plan, a Pointless(?) Program

I readily admit that my accomplishment has no practical social purpose or business application. But as a story that spans 18 years from Hoey’s palindrome to mine, it has a moral about how it is becoming easier to do big things. Hoey is an excellent computer scientist, but he said he spent days writing a disk-based B-tree package for his program. I was saved all this, because a dictionary now fits in main memory and I could use straightforward binary search. —Peter Norvig —A Man, a Plan, a Pointless(?) Program (Google Blog)

Norvig used the power of Google to assemble the world’s longest palindrome (a text that makes the same words backwards and forwards, such as “Madam, I’m Adam.”).

Okay, but Norvig’s palindrome is pretty much a list of words, not a narrative. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the palindrome story written by Nick Montfort and William Gillespe is worth checking out, even if it’s much shorter.