A little amusing Python program

[Chad Franklin Netzer]

Tom_Good1 at excite.com (Tom Good) writes:

>Jeff Sandys <sandysj at juno.com> wrote in message news:<3BBCBA9F.D1777976 at juno.com>...

>> Another program shown at an AI conference was a 
>> document classifier.  To determine which folder to add 
>> the document to, it simply compare the size of the 
>> tarred folders before and after adding the document. 

>I don't get that last part.  How does comparing the size of the
>folders before and after do anything useful?  Wouldn't all of the
>folders increase by the size of the file?

As a guess, I think he may have meant that it adds the file to all the
folders, and then compresses the folders.  The folder that shows the
smallest increase in size (after compression) is the 'correct' folder.
The idea being that the compressor will exploit redundancy, and that
redundancy correlates highly with being in the 'correct' folder.

Obviously, this is speculation.  Hopefully Jeff will clarify what he
meant.

-- 
Chad Netzer
chad.netzer at stanfordalumni.org