[Python-Dev] Summary of Tracker Issues (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Wed May 16 06:49:50 CEST 2007

skip at pobox.com writes:

>> The orb that shines in the sky during the day. ____

Martin> This question I could not answer, because I don't know what an
Martin> orb is (it's not an object request broker, right?)

Martin> Is the answer "sun"?

It is indeed. I would use "star" instead of "orb".

And what happens if the user writes "the sun"? Everyday knowledge is pretty slippery.

It might be reasonable to have a translate the questions into a handful of other languages and let the user select the language.

Since English is the common language used in the community, I think a better source of questions would be the English language itself, such as:

How many words are in the question on this line? ten

John threw a ball at Mark. Who threw it? John_

John was thrown a ball by Mark. Who threw it? Mark_

I think most human readers able to use the tracker would be able to handle even the passive "was thrown" construction without too much trouble.

We could also use easy "reading comprehension" questions, say from the Iowa achievement test for 11-year-olds. :-) Or even the SAT (GMAT, LSAT); there must be banks of practice questions for those. (Copyright might be a problem, though. Any fifth-grade teachers who write drill programs for their kids out there?)

You could also have the user evaluate a simple Python program fragment. Probably it should contain an obvious typo or two to foil a program that evals it.

It would be sad if somebody who could write a program to handle any of those couldn't find a better job than working for spammers ....

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list