Re: ideas for Google Summer of Code

[Graham Breed]

David Kastrup wrote:
> Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:
>   
> > That's not a terrible idea -- IIRC Sibelius and Finale already
> > have something like that built-in -- but it doesn't belong in the
> > main lilypond code.  I'd recommend writing a separate tool, using
> > python or something like htat.
> >     
>
> It could be argued that some sort of Prolog-like system of specifying
> limitations might be more natural.  Or a TeX-like system of specifying
> penalties for certain transitions and mappings, and let the system then
> find the shortest matching graph across (with hard-specified fingerings
> serving as hard constraints, obviously).
>   
Ah, constraints then.  Something like Strasheela

http://strasheela.sourceforge.net/strasheela/doc/index.html

It's for music theory rather than instrumental constraints but I expect 
there's a lot of overlap.  It already outputs Lilypond.  I know very 
little about it or the language it's written in -- Oz.  It's one of the 
interesting things I may look at one day though.

> It appears obvious to me that instrumental experts will not commonly be
> able to write algorithms (let alone efficient ones), but will be able to
> contribute tweaks to settings.
>
> For typesetting tasks, efficient shortest graph traversal based on
> penalties seems to be a nice component to work with (TeX's linebreak
> decisions are done in such a way, and the results are pretty solid).
>   
Maybe there's a theory that says optimizing one value under constraints 
is the same as optimizing various different penalties.


                            t'other Graham