Re: [kidsgames] word familiarity

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

jwaddell@ix.netcom.com wrote:

> word: 128 characters (are there any words longer than this? should it be
> shorter or longer?)

The longest word (not place-name or proper noun) in English is
Antidisestablishmentarianism - a mere 28 letters.  If you allow
proper nouns - but exclude place names, you need to allow 39:
Pneumonoultramicroscopicvolcanoconiosis. There is a town in Wales
called Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch,
but even that is only 57 characters...so I think you're OK with 128.

I guess you could add synonyms and antonyms - and words that rhyme.

Creating such a database would be a monumental undertaking.

Have you estimated the size of the task?

Back in the early days of the Compact Disk Audio, I worked for
Philips Research Labs where we built the first ever CD-ROM system
by hacking apart one of the prototypes of the first domestic
CD Audio placer - and hooked it up to our 'C.H.R.I.S' home computer
prototype (68000-based IIRC).

As a 'proof of concept' of what a CD-ROM could do (back before
3.5" floppies existed, before the existance of the IBM PC - when
a 10Mb "Winchester" hard disk was considered pretty amazing), we
decided to build a CD-ROM dictionary - when we scoped the amount
of work it would entail, it became apparrent that our team of
five or so engineers would never finish the job in under a couple
of years - so we down-sized the demonstration to just a single
letter.  For some reason (I forget why) we chose the letter 'O'
- and started in on that - expecting it to take maybe a month.
After about 4 weeks, we were all bored to tears with entering the
data and painting the pictures...and we were only about a third
of then way through the letter 'O'.

We were attempting a similar thing to what I think you propose
- for each letter, a couple of lines of text, pointers to synonyms
and antonyms, textual and audio pronounciation guide, pictures
for words like OAF, OAK, OAKAPPLE, ...etc.

Maintaining consistancy over the duration of the project was
very difficult - at the beginning, we were enthusiastic but
inexperienced - at the end we were bored to tears and had
learned a lot...it was noticable how much nastier the pictures
were towards the end of the letter 'o'!

So, even downscaling to words to a childs vocabulary, this is a
HUGE undertaking.  I think you should manually code a couple of
dozen words - timing how long it takes you - then scale that up
to the couple of thousand you're probably going to need.

However, I have to say that this would be a magnificent
resource for potential authors of kids games.  Good luck!

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1@airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker@hti.com      (work)


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