Google's Plop is implemented in Lisp

http://code.google.com/p/plop/source/browse/#svn/trunk/src

by brewski • 18 years ago

66 51 18 years ago

code.google.com

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

So what's it do?

I see a bunch of AI buzzwords.

neilc• 18 years ago

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2008/11/plop-probabilisti...

moshe10• 18 years ago

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...

jderick3• 18 years ago

Pretty interesting.. actually looks somewhat related to my thesis:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~jderick/thesis.pdf

I'll have to look at it more closely when I get a chance.

I was working on learning proofs, rather than programs, but I think there are a lot of similarities.

cabalamat4• 18 years ago

The problem of working out what a program does given its input and output is a very general one. Maybe there could be a competition for programs that do this? (Like the Loebner Prize, but more sensible since the Loebner Prize doesn't really have anything to do with progress in AI). Or maybe such a competition already exists and I don't know about it.

Perhaps a generalisation of this could be used as an intelligence test for AI programs. (for criteria for such a test, see http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/10/economic-defini.html )

paraschopra• 18 years ago

So, its genetic programming.. right?

loumf• 18 years ago

Wouldn't it be pretty odd to see a Lisp framework implemented in some other way?

enomar2• 18 years ago

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?

axod• 18 years ago

if (submission.title.indexOf("lisp")!=-1) submission.voteUp();

surely...

DavidSJ3• 18 years ago

I think you mean:

(if (search "lisp" (submission-title submission)) (incf (submission-score submission)))

moshe10• 18 years ago

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 ;->.

enomar2• 18 years ago

I meant no offense. The work does appear to be interesting, but not for the reason indicated in this post's title.

frisco• 18 years ago

moshe: by the way, you have the greatest email address ever.

aswanson• 18 years ago

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.

thomasmallen• 18 years ago

Unless you know that language best and deliver the best results in it. I used to always be completely technology-agnostic, until I realized that not everyone has time to learn the best technology for the job (unless your company is filthy rich with talent). A coworker of mine was preaching "you can't just go with what you know" the other day, and I thought to myself, "hold on, that may be good and PC, but if I'm the head developer on this project, and I'm not using anything too exotic, why not, assuming that the app is stable and can be reasonably supported?"

I know that when I work with other developers, I want them to use what they will do best with, because I know that I and others are more than smart enough to make minor changes without breaking the thing. Now, it better be well documented, but that's another matter...

Edit: And dammit, why does this topic title tempt me so much to say "your mom is implemented in Lisp"? That's gotta mean something, and I'll bet it's cold as ice.

charrington• 18 years ago

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."

moshe10• 18 years ago

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!

icey• 18 years ago

Maybe one day if you're bored, you could tell the rest of us how you were able to swing a job at Google Research working with Lisp?

I don't know about these guys, but I've always been under the impression that if you're at Google, you're using one of their "Big 4" languages.... Heck, even Norvig is using Python! (I know, he was using it before he went there... but still).

paulgb• 18 years ago

> Another way you can tell that this is an official Google project is the 'Google' label

Neat, that's nice to know.

jimbokun• 18 years ago

I think in one of Steve Yegge's epic narratives of life at Google, he said that only the "Big 4" languages can be deployed on Google's servers.

Does this mean, if you ever wanted your research to go "live" in a Google product, you would first have to rewrite in C++, Java, Python, or Javascript?

stcredzero• 18 years ago

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.

Google's Plop is implemented in Lisp

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