And hung up. Finally, at about noon in my time zone, they phoned to tell me the schedule for the day. I inferred that my program had not been disqualified and settled in for an additional ten hours of nail biting over how badly my program would fare. I had adopted a high-risk strategy and fully expected my natural language system to crash and burn ignomiously. For several reasons unrelated to the contest, I had been putting all my effort into a sex information system.
Sex is a difficult topic linguistically.
It is very broad, covering everything from how to meet a girl to statistics about herpes infections. It is also a topic in which synonyms abound. You would be amazed at the number of synonyms for the female breast. It is also a topic in which oblique phrasings are de rigure. Its difficulty makes it the perfect topic to exercise a new natural language shell.