explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:2601: Instructions

2022-04-04T05:17:12Z

108.162.221.221:

;Turtle graphics
So these are instructions for a turtle graphics program. The audio is drawn from https://xkcd.com/2601/radio.mp3, a 9 hour 7 minute 12 second long audio file It's generated by feeding turtle code into a text-to-speech program, but idk which language or which program. If you can convert the speech back to text, somehow without ruining the formatting (or just do a lot of editing with regex until it looks right), you could feed it into a turtle graphics program and get the resulting drawing.
:If you're not familiar with Turtle and Logo, look at this [[https://www.tutorialspoint.com/logo/logo_quick_guide.htm|quick guide]]. The short version is that these commands move a little cursor, called a turtle, which draws a line as it moves and turns. At this time, contributors have applied a few different computer transcriptions to the entire audio. There are quotes about turtles from a variety of sources intermixed with Logo code. It is expected that some correction to the code is needed, such as adding parenthesis that are not spoken in the audio. Standard Logo commands found in the audio are: PENUP, PENDOWN, SETHEADING (N) (N), SETXY (N) (N), and FORWARD (N). Some custom functions are defined, including DIST (N) (N) (N) (N), LERP (N) (N) (N), MIX (N) (N), CUBIC (N) (N) (N) (N), and SQUARE (N) (N). The next steps are to test the transcripts of these custom functions in a Logo interpreter, at which point we can begin drawing the picture. [[User:Mannerisky|Mannerisky]] ([[User talk:Mannerisky|talk]]) 02:45, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
: The picture indeed will be Bob Ross. The first hour of radio has him saying, "A happy little tree - holding up a happy little world." We can coordinate transcribing this code at [https://github.com/theinternetftw/xkcd2601 GitHub Repository]. Credit for this progress goes to the GitHub owner. [[User:Mannerisky|Mannerisky]] ([[User talk:Mannerisky|talk]]) 04:55, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I don't know what the current image on this page is. Is that the drawing you get by following these instructions? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.100.4|172.70.100.4]] 20:58, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
: Wait I see now, that is the actual image for the comic. It just gets covered up by the button so I can't see it. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.126.87|172.70.126.87]] 21:03, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
::Ah, it looks like someone realized it's actually longer than that. After downloading it, I found it to be 131,329,389 bytes. The Windows Properties viewer claims it is 8h41m08s in length, but that's wrong. It is actually 9h07m06s. By the way, the code is in the Logo language. He seems to have copied this from a book, but I don't know which one. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.100.4|172.70.100.4]] 21:12, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:::Worth taking a look at? I can start looking for books that contain that text[[Special:Contributions/162.158.107.52|162.158.107.52]] 21:39, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

:The automatic speech system is using standard punctuation processing, meaning that critical marks for the code aren't being announced. You can't get the code from the samples without filling in the blanks after getting a transcript. [[User:N|N]] ([[User talk:N|talk]]) 22:19, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

The MP3 file ends with this text: "''I even talk to turtles at times. But you need to understand LOGO to appreciate the great, great things that have been created. We spend so much of our life typing, looking, but never ever seeing.''" [[Special:Contributions/162.158.222.151|162.158.222.151]] 21:17, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

april fools' comic? [[User:GcGYSF(asterisk)P(vertical line)e|GcGYSF(asterisk)P(vertical line)e]] ([[User talk:GcGYSF(asterisk)P(vertical line)e|talk]]) 21:18, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:I think it's an April Fool's joke. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.238.148|108.162.238.148]] 21:20, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
::Well is it 2022/04/01 [[Special:Contributions/141.101.77.189|141.101.77.189]] 21:26, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

Broken Version

I think mine's broken. I don't get it. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.91|172.70.130.91]] 21:29, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:You press the radio button, it selects it, then you can press it a zillion times in any pattern and all it ever does is blink the entire image. Nothing else ever appears other than the radio button, and there’s never any sound so pressing the speaker in the corner to supposedly turn it on or off is also completely pointless.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.126.65|172.70.126.65]] 23:31, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
::Alright, it’s April 2nd now, so if all of you have been LYING about it actually doing something, just playing along with the joke, you can admit it now.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.153|172.70.130.153]] 18:40, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
:::Did it only work on American April 1st, or only for some people? It's the third of April here now, and it's still a boring button that clicks on once and does nothing else. Have I missed it? [[Special:Contributions/108.162.249.13|108.162.249.13]] 20:38, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Given the alt text "happy little turtles" and the tone of the narration I assume we're supposed to pretend the narrator is Bob Ross guiding us to creating an artistic masterpiece with Logo [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.72|172.70.211.72]] 21:31, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

Guys, it's been HOURS and the transcription is still incomplete. Step it up! [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.77|172.70.162.77]] 21:37, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:Not even sure what the transcript should be. I did my best[[Special:Contributions/162.158.107.52|162.158.107.52]] 21:41, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
::I have a feeling this might be one of the longest transcripts on the site. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.43|108.162.245.43]] 21:57, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:::Wanna bet? [[1608: Hoverboard/Transcript]]... --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 20:35, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
:::Or [[980: Money/Transcript]] --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 21:59, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Up until someone automates the process, I'll be working on the transcript and saving it in exkcd in parts (: Don't worry too much about edit overrides, I'll be transcribing in a google doc to avoid that! --[[User:Char Latte49|Wielder of the Staple Gun]] ([[User talk:Char Latte49|talk]]) 21:53, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:The sections about turtles between the code blocks seems to be from

Interesting Facts About Turtles
A Little Nature Study by a Scientist that will Interest Old and Young Naturalists Alike
By Randle C. Rosenberger M. D., Professor of Hygiene and Bacteriology, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, Pa.
https://archive.org/stream/foreststream861916newy/foreststream861916newy_djvu.txt

The uni.xkcd version of this comic also just shows the turtle like this article. So much for uses two April Fools comics against each other ;) [[Special:Contributions/172.70.114.77|172.70.114.77]] 22:44, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

I ran the MP3 through Amazon Transcribe. It can do only 4 hours at a time, so I had to split the original file. I went from start to 03:59:59, 03:59:59 to 07:59:58, and 07:59:58 to end. Amazon Transcribe also gave me some subtitle files (index 1). They have time codes in them. So if someone wanted to note the times of the little quips, and host the audio file somewhere where links to the middle of the file can be generated (like YouTube), that could be cool. Below are the transcriptions for analysis. Replace X with 1, 2, or 3; and replace Y with json, srt, or vtt. [[User:Pgn674|Pgn674]] ([[User talk:Pgn674|talk]]) 23:15, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

:<code><nowiki>https://pgn674.s3.amazonaws.com/xkcd-2601/xkcd-2601-X.Y</nowiki></code>
:: No need to host anything special. Let's say we want to jump to time code 02:35:14.840 from the vtt subtitle file #1 (line 7084, subtitle 1771). 2*60*60+35*60+14=9314. Subtract a few seconds, and make a link like this. Click here to learn about turtle noises: https://xkcd.com/2601/radio.mp3#t=9310 [[User:Pgn674|Pgn674]] ([[User talk:Pgn674|talk]]) 23:48, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
::: I went and found all mentions of "turtle", extracted those lines, and generated links to them. Programmatically. If anyone wants to go through and do some manual review and fine tuning, go ahead. [[User:Pgn674|Pgn674]] ([[User talk:Pgn674|talk]]) 00:57, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I threw Adobe Premiere Pro at it: https://anonfiles.com/pbYfK7Sax4/radio_csv; and https://anonfiles.com/35YbKeScxe/radio_txt are the results. Note: these transcribe until 07:01:28:19. I am currently in the process of making APP suffer more and churn out the last two hours. --[[User:ẞ qwertz|ẞ qwertz]] ([[User talk:ẞ qwertz|talk]]) 23:54, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

So... what language is this? I'm hearing: PENUP, PENDOWN, SETHEADING (N) (N), SETXY (N) (N), FORWARD (N) - all of which are standard LOGO commands. But I'm also hearing something that sounds like CUBIC (N) (N) (N) (N) (N) (N), though it could also be QBIT, or text-to-speech for something like "^3". Either way it's NOT a standard LOGO command, so suggests it's a variant. Does not seem to be KTurtle, POOL, UCBLogo. QLogo, FMSLogo, and then I got bored searching. --[[Special:Contributions/172.69.71.91|172.69.71.91]] 00:37, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
:In the automatic transcription it has "Two cubic colon X one colon Y one colon X two"... which would be TO CUBIC :X1 :Y1 :X2 ... so it is defined above. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.107.230|162.158.107.230]] 01:15, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
:: Yes, some of the commands seem to be defined at the top. CUBIC at the top, SQUARE maybe somewhere else. So a shortcut to decyphering it might be to just extract and render all the cubes from the "CUBIC" and "SQUARE" commands, given their values. But what format are the cubes? Are they even the coordinates of cubes? For both commands, the six numbers seem to be in the format A B A B A B where the As and Bs are similar or even in some cases identical, which seems a strange thing for a cube:
<blockquote><pre>
SetXY -443 412
PenDown
Square -443 405 -443 397 -444 390
</pre></blockquote>
The definition seems to be something like:
<blockquote><pre>
ToCubic : X1 : Y1 : X2 : Y2 : Ex : Ey --- Parameter definitions?
local Make " X0 XCor --- Local variable definitions?
Local Make " Y0 YCor
Local Make " ErrX1 Lerp : X0 : X 0.25
local Make " ErrY1 Lerp : Y0 : Ey 0.25
Local Make " ErrX2 Lerp : X0 : Ex 0.75
Local Make " ErrY2 Lerp : Y0 : Ey 0.75
IfElse
Or
LessP : picks error Dist : ErrX1 : ErrY1 : X1 : Y1
LessP : picks error Dist : ErrX2 : ErrY2 : X2 : Y2
[
Local Make " Qx0 mix : X0 : X1
Local Make " Qy0 mix : Y0 : Y1
Local Make " Qx1 mix : X1 : X2
Local Make " qy1 Mix : Y1 : Y2
Local Make " Qx2 mix : X2 : EX
Local Make " Qy2 mix : Y2 : Ey
Local Make " Lx0 mix : Qx0 : QX1
Local Make " Ly0 mix : Qy0 : QY1
Local Make " Lx1 Mix : Qx1 : Qx2
Local Make " Ly1 Mix : qy1 : Q
Local Make " PmX Mix : Lx0 : Lx1
Local Make " PmY Mix : Ly0 : LY1
Cubic : Qx0 : qy0 : Lx0 : Ly0 : PmX : PmY
Cubic : Lx1 : Ly1 : Qx2 : Qy2 : Ex : Ey
]
[
SetXY : Ex : Ey
]
</pre></blockquote>
Least, that's what it sounds like, but I suspect round brackets and suchlike are not spoken aloud :( --[[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.95|108.162.221.95]] 01:54, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

: Maybe it's implementing a cubic spline interpolation, not a tridimensional cube. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.131.214|172.70.131.214]] 11:08, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Feels like the speech processing is lossy, so generating the code will be a lengthy labor of love transcribing it, then debugging it, trying to fill the gaps. The code may also have been fed through an automated "Bob Ross filter" which may have lost even more data. --[[Special:Contributions/172.69.71.91|172.69.71.91]] 00:37, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

About a quarter of the way into the text is the line "You know, I'm beginning to suspect it's turtles all the way down!" [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.215|162.158.78.215]] 00:46, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

it's concerning that the only real way we'll be able to figure this comic out is to compile the entire 9 hour computer-generated voice speech. [[User:Lettherebedarklight|youtube.com/watch?v=miLcaqq2Zpk]] ([[User talk:Lettherebedarklight|talk]]) 01:40, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
:Anyone actually doing any transcribing of this audio text is a true April Fools' fool, hence the reason to release this on April 1st. But I'd still like to see what the Fools' come up with :-D --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 21:26, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I'm moving all things about audio transcription here: [[2601: Instructions/Audio Transcript]], both the real transcript and peoples very long comments in the main discussion, to keep the main page short and keep loading time down. The comments from here go in the [[Talk:2601: Instructions/Audio Transcript|discussion]] for that page --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 20:35, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

OMG, fond memories of LOGO! I'm in a loud bar at the moment so I can't listen, and I'm not listening to NINE HOURS anyway, LOL! Everybody DOES realize, someone needs to extract the program and run it in LOGO, right? I would guarantee this draws something interesting and/or stupid. :) [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 03:27, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I found a [https://github.com/theinternetftw/xkcd2601 GitHub Repository] for transcription. May be of use to you guys for adding more info and citations to this Wiki. By the way, I didn't know this wiki existed. I don't want to create an account for it right now so good luck guys ;-; 04:12, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I tried running some code through "ucblogo" on a Linux distro, but didn't get very far with it. ---Tim 04:16, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Given that the audio is generated by text-to-speech, could a source-aware speech-to-text work better (fewer errors and less manual correction) than a generic one? For example, finding the right text-to-speech, extracting a sound for each phoneme, and then searching for near-identical snippets of waveform, seems like it could potentially be more reliable than the generic neural nets which are primarily trained for real human speech. Or even training a neural net on the same text-to-speech source, with a big block of sample data, if that would help distinguish homophones. Presumably someone here is good enough at this sort of thing to try that? [[User:Sqek|Sqek]] ([[User talk:Sqek|talk]]) 10:05, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I think that the original comment at the top is the best approach. Using the speech-to-text data posted yesterday, and doing some simple regsubs, I can get it into good enough shape that I can proceed to transcribe the whole program by editing the file while listening to the audio, in real time. "In real time" means nine hours to correctly transcribe the whole thing. So any other approach would have to do better than nine hours. Plus if somebody put a little effort into organization, the transcription can be parallelized and so completed in nine hours / N transcribers. ---Tim [[Special:Contributions/172.70.38.41|172.70.38.41]] 13:10, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I was helping with this last night, and here are the major steps we've done to interpret the code and who has helped, I think.
* [[User:Pgn674|Pgn674]] Used AWS to make a transcription of the audio, which we have been building from
* [[Special:Contributions/172.68.118.59|172.68.118.59]] Transcribed the critical functions at the top of the transcription
* [https://github.com/theinternetftw theinternetftw] Found a working interpreter and set up a collaboration space at [https://github.com/theinternetftw/xkcd2601 a GitHub repo], and has since been maintaining the code
* [https://github.com/theinternetftw theinternetftw] Also transcribed the first hour and got us our view of a partial picture
* [https://github.com/somebody1234 somebody1234] Got a messy but runnable version of the entire transcription and a view of the entire picture with errors
* Many people are transcribing bits of audio and submitting to GitHub. Here is the list of [https://github.com/theinternetftw/xkcd2601/graphs/contributors contributors]
[[User:Mannerisky|Mannerisky]] ([[User talk:Mannerisky|talk]]) 15:06, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I have changed the image to that which is seen on xkcd when loading the comic. It has not been updated on this page yet as of when I write this. But the turtle is of course not the comic, but a placeholder for those webcrawlers that would fail when trying to download the radio button. I have also added info on this in the current explanation. As I have made a link to a new sub page for the looong audio transcript and removed all of that from this page and discussion and put it here: [[2601: Instructions/Audio Transcript]] --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 21:38, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I started planning to write some code to figure this out, but moved on to other things after a few hours, due to psychological issues I have. The draft just runs the audio through the start of a random speech to text model. I trained a tokenizer around the logo code but didn't move farther. There are a lot of possible next steps, some of which others have mentioned. A simple approach would be to finetune the model around the hand-transcribed data. https://colab.research.google.com/gist/xloem/4310a26b6c9d13adac14307b948157d3/untitled4.ipynb [[Special:Contributions/172.70.114.147|172.70.114.147]] 23:04, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Any plans to exkcd the "real" comic that gets drawn by the LOGO code in the audio? I mean, I recognize, e. g., the Mars rover and Ursa Major, but what's the significance of the vacuum decay here, for instance? [[User:Nitpicking|Nitpicking]] ([[User talk:Nitpicking|talk]]) 01:18, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
:Now that the project is complete, we should add the resulting image on this page (not just a link to github). It'll be what folks are looking for first. And then we can start identifying the many references in the picture and turtle quotes. [[User:Mannerisky|Mannerisky]] ([[User talk:Mannerisky|talk]]) 04:26, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
::well, i added the picture. [[User:Lettherebedarklight|youtube.com/watch?v=miLcaqq2Zpk]] ([[User talk:Lettherebedarklight|talk]]) 08:08, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

It was wonderful watching all of this unfold. Great work everyone. I don't have an account here, nor on github, but I thought I'd mention that the makesvg.py uses the ':=' operator which was introduced in python 3.8. Not all of us have it on our creaky old machines. Maybe add a comment in the usage at the top of the file? Or better, refactor the .py?
-- [[Special:Contributions/172.70.100.4|172.70.100.4]] 14:39, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

Is there a trick to making it work? I've tried both Firefox and Chrome. I hear the narration and can toggle the mute, but it never draws the picture for me. I have enabled JavaScript and I have disabled Privacy Badger, NoSCript, and uBlock Origin and still no joy. I did find the final drawing so I've seen the animation via GIF.
--[[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.221|108.162.221.221]]
:: Signing with triple tilde puts the WRONG IP address for me! My IP is NOT 108.162.221.221, my IP is 47.186.56.37. What gives????
:: --[[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.221|108.162.221.221]]

Talk:2601: Instructions

2022-04-04T05:12:55Z

108.162.221.221:

;Turtle graphics
So these are instructions for a turtle graphics program. The audio is drawn from https://xkcd.com/2601/radio.mp3, a 9 hour 7 minute 12 second long audio file It's generated by feeding turtle code into a text-to-speech program, but idk which language or which program. If you can convert the speech back to text, somehow without ruining the formatting (or just do a lot of editing with regex until it looks right), you could feed it into a turtle graphics program and get the resulting drawing.
:If you're not familiar with Turtle and Logo, look at this [[https://www.tutorialspoint.com/logo/logo_quick_guide.htm|quick guide]]. The short version is that these commands move a little cursor, called a turtle, which draws a line as it moves and turns. At this time, contributors have applied a few different computer transcriptions to the entire audio. There are quotes about turtles from a variety of sources intermixed with Logo code. It is expected that some correction to the code is needed, such as adding parenthesis that are not spoken in the audio. Standard Logo commands found in the audio are: PENUP, PENDOWN, SETHEADING (N) (N), SETXY (N) (N), and FORWARD (N). Some custom functions are defined, including DIST (N) (N) (N) (N), LERP (N) (N) (N), MIX (N) (N), CUBIC (N) (N) (N) (N), and SQUARE (N) (N). The next steps are to test the transcripts of these custom functions in a Logo interpreter, at which point we can begin drawing the picture. [[User:Mannerisky|Mannerisky]] ([[User talk:Mannerisky|talk]]) 02:45, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
: The picture indeed will be Bob Ross. The first hour of radio has him saying, "A happy little tree - holding up a happy little world." We can coordinate transcribing this code at [https://github.com/theinternetftw/xkcd2601 GitHub Repository]. Credit for this progress goes to the GitHub owner. [[User:Mannerisky|Mannerisky]] ([[User talk:Mannerisky|talk]]) 04:55, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I don't know what the current image on this page is. Is that the drawing you get by following these instructions? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.100.4|172.70.100.4]] 20:58, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
: Wait I see now, that is the actual image for the comic. It just gets covered up by the button so I can't see it. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.126.87|172.70.126.87]] 21:03, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
::Ah, it looks like someone realized it's actually longer than that. After downloading it, I found it to be 131,329,389 bytes. The Windows Properties viewer claims it is 8h41m08s in length, but that's wrong. It is actually 9h07m06s. By the way, the code is in the Logo language. He seems to have copied this from a book, but I don't know which one. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.100.4|172.70.100.4]] 21:12, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:::Worth taking a look at? I can start looking for books that contain that text[[Special:Contributions/162.158.107.52|162.158.107.52]] 21:39, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

:The automatic speech system is using standard punctuation processing, meaning that critical marks for the code aren't being announced. You can't get the code from the samples without filling in the blanks after getting a transcript. [[User:N|N]] ([[User talk:N|talk]]) 22:19, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

The MP3 file ends with this text: "''I even talk to turtles at times. But you need to understand LOGO to appreciate the great, great things that have been created. We spend so much of our life typing, looking, but never ever seeing.''" [[Special:Contributions/162.158.222.151|162.158.222.151]] 21:17, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

april fools' comic? [[User:GcGYSF(asterisk)P(vertical line)e|GcGYSF(asterisk)P(vertical line)e]] ([[User talk:GcGYSF(asterisk)P(vertical line)e|talk]]) 21:18, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:I think it's an April Fool's joke. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.238.148|108.162.238.148]] 21:20, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
::Well is it 2022/04/01 [[Special:Contributions/141.101.77.189|141.101.77.189]] 21:26, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

Broken Version

I think mine's broken. I don't get it. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.91|172.70.130.91]] 21:29, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:You press the radio button, it selects it, then you can press it a zillion times in any pattern and all it ever does is blink the entire image. Nothing else ever appears other than the radio button, and there’s never any sound so pressing the speaker in the corner to supposedly turn it on or off is also completely pointless.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.126.65|172.70.126.65]] 23:31, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
::Alright, it’s April 2nd now, so if all of you have been LYING about it actually doing something, just playing along with the joke, you can admit it now.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.153|172.70.130.153]] 18:40, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
:::Did it only work on American April 1st, or only for some people? It's the third of April here now, and it's still a boring button that clicks on once and does nothing else. Have I missed it? [[Special:Contributions/108.162.249.13|108.162.249.13]] 20:38, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Given the alt text "happy little turtles" and the tone of the narration I assume we're supposed to pretend the narrator is Bob Ross guiding us to creating an artistic masterpiece with Logo [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.72|172.70.211.72]] 21:31, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

Guys, it's been HOURS and the transcription is still incomplete. Step it up! [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.77|172.70.162.77]] 21:37, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:Not even sure what the transcript should be. I did my best[[Special:Contributions/162.158.107.52|162.158.107.52]] 21:41, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
::I have a feeling this might be one of the longest transcripts on the site. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.43|108.162.245.43]] 21:57, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:::Wanna bet? [[1608: Hoverboard/Transcript]]... --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 20:35, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
:::Or [[980: Money/Transcript]] --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 21:59, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Up until someone automates the process, I'll be working on the transcript and saving it in exkcd in parts (: Don't worry too much about edit overrides, I'll be transcribing in a google doc to avoid that! --[[User:Char Latte49|Wielder of the Staple Gun]] ([[User talk:Char Latte49|talk]]) 21:53, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:The sections about turtles between the code blocks seems to be from

Interesting Facts About Turtles
A Little Nature Study by a Scientist that will Interest Old and Young Naturalists Alike
By Randle C. Rosenberger M. D., Professor of Hygiene and Bacteriology, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, Pa.
https://archive.org/stream/foreststream861916newy/foreststream861916newy_djvu.txt

The uni.xkcd version of this comic also just shows the turtle like this article. So much for uses two April Fools comics against each other ;) [[Special:Contributions/172.70.114.77|172.70.114.77]] 22:44, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

I ran the MP3 through Amazon Transcribe. It can do only 4 hours at a time, so I had to split the original file. I went from start to 03:59:59, 03:59:59 to 07:59:58, and 07:59:58 to end. Amazon Transcribe also gave me some subtitle files (index 1). They have time codes in them. So if someone wanted to note the times of the little quips, and host the audio file somewhere where links to the middle of the file can be generated (like YouTube), that could be cool. Below are the transcriptions for analysis. Replace X with 1, 2, or 3; and replace Y with json, srt, or vtt. [[User:Pgn674|Pgn674]] ([[User talk:Pgn674|talk]]) 23:15, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

:<code><nowiki>https://pgn674.s3.amazonaws.com/xkcd-2601/xkcd-2601-X.Y</nowiki></code>
:: No need to host anything special. Let's say we want to jump to time code 02:35:14.840 from the vtt subtitle file #1 (line 7084, subtitle 1771). 2*60*60+35*60+14=9314. Subtract a few seconds, and make a link like this. Click here to learn about turtle noises: https://xkcd.com/2601/radio.mp3#t=9310 [[User:Pgn674|Pgn674]] ([[User talk:Pgn674|talk]]) 23:48, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
::: I went and found all mentions of "turtle", extracted those lines, and generated links to them. Programmatically. If anyone wants to go through and do some manual review and fine tuning, go ahead. [[User:Pgn674|Pgn674]] ([[User talk:Pgn674|talk]]) 00:57, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I threw Adobe Premiere Pro at it: https://anonfiles.com/pbYfK7Sax4/radio_csv; and https://anonfiles.com/35YbKeScxe/radio_txt are the results. Note: these transcribe until 07:01:28:19. I am currently in the process of making APP suffer more and churn out the last two hours. --[[User:ẞ qwertz|ẞ qwertz]] ([[User talk:ẞ qwertz|talk]]) 23:54, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

So... what language is this? I'm hearing: PENUP, PENDOWN, SETHEADING (N) (N), SETXY (N) (N), FORWARD (N) - all of which are standard LOGO commands. But I'm also hearing something that sounds like CUBIC (N) (N) (N) (N) (N) (N), though it could also be QBIT, or text-to-speech for something like "^3". Either way it's NOT a standard LOGO command, so suggests it's a variant. Does not seem to be KTurtle, POOL, UCBLogo. QLogo, FMSLogo, and then I got bored searching. --[[Special:Contributions/172.69.71.91|172.69.71.91]] 00:37, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
:In the automatic transcription it has "Two cubic colon X one colon Y one colon X two"... which would be TO CUBIC :X1 :Y1 :X2 ... so it is defined above. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.107.230|162.158.107.230]] 01:15, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
:: Yes, some of the commands seem to be defined at the top. CUBIC at the top, SQUARE maybe somewhere else. So a shortcut to decyphering it might be to just extract and render all the cubes from the "CUBIC" and "SQUARE" commands, given their values. But what format are the cubes? Are they even the coordinates of cubes? For both commands, the six numbers seem to be in the format A B A B A B where the As and Bs are similar or even in some cases identical, which seems a strange thing for a cube:
<blockquote><pre>
SetXY -443 412
PenDown
Square -443 405 -443 397 -444 390
</pre></blockquote>
The definition seems to be something like:
<blockquote><pre>
ToCubic : X1 : Y1 : X2 : Y2 : Ex : Ey --- Parameter definitions?
local Make " X0 XCor --- Local variable definitions?
Local Make " Y0 YCor
Local Make " ErrX1 Lerp : X0 : X 0.25
local Make " ErrY1 Lerp : Y0 : Ey 0.25
Local Make " ErrX2 Lerp : X0 : Ex 0.75
Local Make " ErrY2 Lerp : Y0 : Ey 0.75
IfElse
Or
LessP : picks error Dist : ErrX1 : ErrY1 : X1 : Y1
LessP : picks error Dist : ErrX2 : ErrY2 : X2 : Y2
[
Local Make " Qx0 mix : X0 : X1
Local Make " Qy0 mix : Y0 : Y1
Local Make " Qx1 mix : X1 : X2
Local Make " qy1 Mix : Y1 : Y2
Local Make " Qx2 mix : X2 : EX
Local Make " Qy2 mix : Y2 : Ey
Local Make " Lx0 mix : Qx0 : QX1
Local Make " Ly0 mix : Qy0 : QY1
Local Make " Lx1 Mix : Qx1 : Qx2
Local Make " Ly1 Mix : qy1 : Q
Local Make " PmX Mix : Lx0 : Lx1
Local Make " PmY Mix : Ly0 : LY1
Cubic : Qx0 : qy0 : Lx0 : Ly0 : PmX : PmY
Cubic : Lx1 : Ly1 : Qx2 : Qy2 : Ex : Ey
]
[
SetXY : Ex : Ey
]
</pre></blockquote>
Least, that's what it sounds like, but I suspect round brackets and suchlike are not spoken aloud :( --[[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.95|108.162.221.95]] 01:54, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

: Maybe it's implementing a cubic spline interpolation, not a tridimensional cube. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.131.214|172.70.131.214]] 11:08, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Feels like the speech processing is lossy, so generating the code will be a lengthy labor of love transcribing it, then debugging it, trying to fill the gaps. The code may also have been fed through an automated "Bob Ross filter" which may have lost even more data. --[[Special:Contributions/172.69.71.91|172.69.71.91]] 00:37, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

About a quarter of the way into the text is the line "You know, I'm beginning to suspect it's turtles all the way down!" [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.215|162.158.78.215]] 00:46, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

it's concerning that the only real way we'll be able to figure this comic out is to compile the entire 9 hour computer-generated voice speech. [[User:Lettherebedarklight|youtube.com/watch?v=miLcaqq2Zpk]] ([[User talk:Lettherebedarklight|talk]]) 01:40, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
:Anyone actually doing any transcribing of this audio text is a true April Fools' fool, hence the reason to release this on April 1st. But I'd still like to see what the Fools' come up with :-D --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 21:26, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I'm moving all things about audio transcription here: [[2601: Instructions/Audio Transcript]], both the real transcript and peoples very long comments in the main discussion, to keep the main page short and keep loading time down. The comments from here go in the [[Talk:2601: Instructions/Audio Transcript|discussion]] for that page --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 20:35, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

OMG, fond memories of LOGO! I'm in a loud bar at the moment so I can't listen, and I'm not listening to NINE HOURS anyway, LOL! Everybody DOES realize, someone needs to extract the program and run it in LOGO, right? I would guarantee this draws something interesting and/or stupid. :) [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 03:27, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I found a [https://github.com/theinternetftw/xkcd2601 GitHub Repository] for transcription. May be of use to you guys for adding more info and citations to this Wiki. By the way, I didn't know this wiki existed. I don't want to create an account for it right now so good luck guys ;-; 04:12, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I tried running some code through "ucblogo" on a Linux distro, but didn't get very far with it. ---Tim 04:16, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Given that the audio is generated by text-to-speech, could a source-aware speech-to-text work better (fewer errors and less manual correction) than a generic one? For example, finding the right text-to-speech, extracting a sound for each phoneme, and then searching for near-identical snippets of waveform, seems like it could potentially be more reliable than the generic neural nets which are primarily trained for real human speech. Or even training a neural net on the same text-to-speech source, with a big block of sample data, if that would help distinguish homophones. Presumably someone here is good enough at this sort of thing to try that? [[User:Sqek|Sqek]] ([[User talk:Sqek|talk]]) 10:05, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I think that the original comment at the top is the best approach. Using the speech-to-text data posted yesterday, and doing some simple regsubs, I can get it into good enough shape that I can proceed to transcribe the whole program by editing the file while listening to the audio, in real time. "In real time" means nine hours to correctly transcribe the whole thing. So any other approach would have to do better than nine hours. Plus if somebody put a little effort into organization, the transcription can be parallelized and so completed in nine hours / N transcribers. ---Tim [[Special:Contributions/172.70.38.41|172.70.38.41]] 13:10, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I was helping with this last night, and here are the major steps we've done to interpret the code and who has helped, I think.
* [[User:Pgn674|Pgn674]] Used AWS to make a transcription of the audio, which we have been building from
* [[Special:Contributions/172.68.118.59|172.68.118.59]] Transcribed the critical functions at the top of the transcription
* [https://github.com/theinternetftw theinternetftw] Found a working interpreter and set up a collaboration space at [https://github.com/theinternetftw/xkcd2601 a GitHub repo], and has since been maintaining the code
* [https://github.com/theinternetftw theinternetftw] Also transcribed the first hour and got us our view of a partial picture
* [https://github.com/somebody1234 somebody1234] Got a messy but runnable version of the entire transcription and a view of the entire picture with errors
* Many people are transcribing bits of audio and submitting to GitHub. Here is the list of [https://github.com/theinternetftw/xkcd2601/graphs/contributors contributors]
[[User:Mannerisky|Mannerisky]] ([[User talk:Mannerisky|talk]]) 15:06, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I have changed the image to that which is seen on xkcd when loading the comic. It has not been updated on this page yet as of when I write this. But the turtle is of course not the comic, but a placeholder for those webcrawlers that would fail when trying to download the radio button. I have also added info on this in the current explanation. As I have made a link to a new sub page for the looong audio transcript and removed all of that from this page and discussion and put it here: [[2601: Instructions/Audio Transcript]] --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 21:38, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I started planning to write some code to figure this out, but moved on to other things after a few hours, due to psychological issues I have. The draft just runs the audio through the start of a random speech to text model. I trained a tokenizer around the logo code but didn't move farther. There are a lot of possible next steps, some of which others have mentioned. A simple approach would be to finetune the model around the hand-transcribed data. https://colab.research.google.com/gist/xloem/4310a26b6c9d13adac14307b948157d3/untitled4.ipynb [[Special:Contributions/172.70.114.147|172.70.114.147]] 23:04, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Any plans to exkcd the "real" comic that gets drawn by the LOGO code in the audio? I mean, I recognize, e. g., the Mars rover and Ursa Major, but what's the significance of the vacuum decay here, for instance? [[User:Nitpicking|Nitpicking]] ([[User talk:Nitpicking|talk]]) 01:18, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
:Now that the project is complete, we should add the resulting image on this page (not just a link to github). It'll be what folks are looking for first. And then we can start identifying the many references in the picture and turtle quotes. [[User:Mannerisky|Mannerisky]] ([[User talk:Mannerisky|talk]]) 04:26, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
::well, i added the picture. [[User:Lettherebedarklight|youtube.com/watch?v=miLcaqq2Zpk]] ([[User talk:Lettherebedarklight|talk]]) 08:08, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

It was wonderful watching all of this unfold. Great work everyone. I don't have an account here, nor on github, but I thought I'd mention that the makesvg.py uses the ':=' operator which was introduced in python 3.8. Not all of us have it on our creaky old machines. Maybe add a comment in the usage at the top of the file? Or better, refactor the .py?
-- [[Special:Contributions/172.70.100.4|172.70.100.4]] 14:39, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

Is there a trick to making it work? I've tried both Firefox and Chrome. I hear the narration and can toggle the mute, but it never draws the picture for me. I have enabled JavaScript and I have disabled Privacy Badger, NoSCript, and uBlock Origin and still no joy. I did find the final drawing so I've seen the animation via GIF. [[Special:Contributions/47.186.56.37|47.186.56.37]]

Talk:2601: Instructions

2022-04-04T05:10:56Z

108.162.221.221: Not working for me.

;Turtle graphics
So these are instructions for a turtle graphics program. The audio is drawn from https://xkcd.com/2601/radio.mp3, a 9 hour 7 minute 12 second long audio file It's generated by feeding turtle code into a text-to-speech program, but idk which language or which program. If you can convert the speech back to text, somehow without ruining the formatting (or just do a lot of editing with regex until it looks right), you could feed it into a turtle graphics program and get the resulting drawing.
:If you're not familiar with Turtle and Logo, look at this [[https://www.tutorialspoint.com/logo/logo_quick_guide.htm|quick guide]]. The short version is that these commands move a little cursor, called a turtle, which draws a line as it moves and turns. At this time, contributors have applied a few different computer transcriptions to the entire audio. There are quotes about turtles from a variety of sources intermixed with Logo code. It is expected that some correction to the code is needed, such as adding parenthesis that are not spoken in the audio. Standard Logo commands found in the audio are: PENUP, PENDOWN, SETHEADING (N) (N), SETXY (N) (N), and FORWARD (N). Some custom functions are defined, including DIST (N) (N) (N) (N), LERP (N) (N) (N), MIX (N) (N), CUBIC (N) (N) (N) (N), and SQUARE (N) (N). The next steps are to test the transcripts of these custom functions in a Logo interpreter, at which point we can begin drawing the picture. [[User:Mannerisky|Mannerisky]] ([[User talk:Mannerisky|talk]]) 02:45, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
: The picture indeed will be Bob Ross. The first hour of radio has him saying, "A happy little tree - holding up a happy little world." We can coordinate transcribing this code at [https://github.com/theinternetftw/xkcd2601 GitHub Repository]. Credit for this progress goes to the GitHub owner. [[User:Mannerisky|Mannerisky]] ([[User talk:Mannerisky|talk]]) 04:55, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I don't know what the current image on this page is. Is that the drawing you get by following these instructions? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.100.4|172.70.100.4]] 20:58, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
: Wait I see now, that is the actual image for the comic. It just gets covered up by the button so I can't see it. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.126.87|172.70.126.87]] 21:03, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
::Ah, it looks like someone realized it's actually longer than that. After downloading it, I found it to be 131,329,389 bytes. The Windows Properties viewer claims it is 8h41m08s in length, but that's wrong. It is actually 9h07m06s. By the way, the code is in the Logo language. He seems to have copied this from a book, but I don't know which one. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.100.4|172.70.100.4]] 21:12, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:::Worth taking a look at? I can start looking for books that contain that text[[Special:Contributions/162.158.107.52|162.158.107.52]] 21:39, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

:The automatic speech system is using standard punctuation processing, meaning that critical marks for the code aren't being announced. You can't get the code from the samples without filling in the blanks after getting a transcript. [[User:N|N]] ([[User talk:N|talk]]) 22:19, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

The MP3 file ends with this text: "''I even talk to turtles at times. But you need to understand LOGO to appreciate the great, great things that have been created. We spend so much of our life typing, looking, but never ever seeing.''" [[Special:Contributions/162.158.222.151|162.158.222.151]] 21:17, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

april fools' comic? [[User:GcGYSF(asterisk)P(vertical line)e|GcGYSF(asterisk)P(vertical line)e]] ([[User talk:GcGYSF(asterisk)P(vertical line)e|talk]]) 21:18, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:I think it's an April Fool's joke. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.238.148|108.162.238.148]] 21:20, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
::Well is it 2022/04/01 [[Special:Contributions/141.101.77.189|141.101.77.189]] 21:26, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

Broken Version

I think mine's broken. I don't get it. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.91|172.70.130.91]] 21:29, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:You press the radio button, it selects it, then you can press it a zillion times in any pattern and all it ever does is blink the entire image. Nothing else ever appears other than the radio button, and there’s never any sound so pressing the speaker in the corner to supposedly turn it on or off is also completely pointless.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.126.65|172.70.126.65]] 23:31, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
::Alright, it’s April 2nd now, so if all of you have been LYING about it actually doing something, just playing along with the joke, you can admit it now.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.153|172.70.130.153]] 18:40, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
:::Did it only work on American April 1st, or only for some people? It's the third of April here now, and it's still a boring button that clicks on once and does nothing else. Have I missed it? [[Special:Contributions/108.162.249.13|108.162.249.13]] 20:38, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Given the alt text "happy little turtles" and the tone of the narration I assume we're supposed to pretend the narrator is Bob Ross guiding us to creating an artistic masterpiece with Logo [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.72|172.70.211.72]] 21:31, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

Guys, it's been HOURS and the transcription is still incomplete. Step it up! [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.77|172.70.162.77]] 21:37, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:Not even sure what the transcript should be. I did my best[[Special:Contributions/162.158.107.52|162.158.107.52]] 21:41, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
::I have a feeling this might be one of the longest transcripts on the site. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.43|108.162.245.43]] 21:57, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:::Wanna bet? [[1608: Hoverboard/Transcript]]... --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 20:35, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
:::Or [[980: Money/Transcript]] --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 21:59, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Up until someone automates the process, I'll be working on the transcript and saving it in exkcd in parts (: Don't worry too much about edit overrides, I'll be transcribing in a google doc to avoid that! --[[User:Char Latte49|Wielder of the Staple Gun]] ([[User talk:Char Latte49|talk]]) 21:53, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
:The sections about turtles between the code blocks seems to be from

Interesting Facts About Turtles
A Little Nature Study by a Scientist that will Interest Old and Young Naturalists Alike
By Randle C. Rosenberger M. D., Professor of Hygiene and Bacteriology, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, Pa.
https://archive.org/stream/foreststream861916newy/foreststream861916newy_djvu.txt

The uni.xkcd version of this comic also just shows the turtle like this article. So much for uses two April Fools comics against each other ;) [[Special:Contributions/172.70.114.77|172.70.114.77]] 22:44, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

I ran the MP3 through Amazon Transcribe. It can do only 4 hours at a time, so I had to split the original file. I went from start to 03:59:59, 03:59:59 to 07:59:58, and 07:59:58 to end. Amazon Transcribe also gave me some subtitle files (index 1). They have time codes in them. So if someone wanted to note the times of the little quips, and host the audio file somewhere where links to the middle of the file can be generated (like YouTube), that could be cool. Below are the transcriptions for analysis. Replace X with 1, 2, or 3; and replace Y with json, srt, or vtt. [[User:Pgn674|Pgn674]] ([[User talk:Pgn674|talk]]) 23:15, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

:<code><nowiki>https://pgn674.s3.amazonaws.com/xkcd-2601/xkcd-2601-X.Y</nowiki></code>
:: No need to host anything special. Let's say we want to jump to time code 02:35:14.840 from the vtt subtitle file #1 (line 7084, subtitle 1771). 2*60*60+35*60+14=9314. Subtract a few seconds, and make a link like this. Click here to learn about turtle noises: https://xkcd.com/2601/radio.mp3#t=9310 [[User:Pgn674|Pgn674]] ([[User talk:Pgn674|talk]]) 23:48, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
::: I went and found all mentions of "turtle", extracted those lines, and generated links to them. Programmatically. If anyone wants to go through and do some manual review and fine tuning, go ahead. [[User:Pgn674|Pgn674]] ([[User talk:Pgn674|talk]]) 00:57, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I threw Adobe Premiere Pro at it: https://anonfiles.com/pbYfK7Sax4/radio_csv; and https://anonfiles.com/35YbKeScxe/radio_txt are the results. Note: these transcribe until 07:01:28:19. I am currently in the process of making APP suffer more and churn out the last two hours. --[[User:ẞ qwertz|ẞ qwertz]] ([[User talk:ẞ qwertz|talk]]) 23:54, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

So... what language is this? I'm hearing: PENUP, PENDOWN, SETHEADING (N) (N), SETXY (N) (N), FORWARD (N) - all of which are standard LOGO commands. But I'm also hearing something that sounds like CUBIC (N) (N) (N) (N) (N) (N), though it could also be QBIT, or text-to-speech for something like "^3". Either way it's NOT a standard LOGO command, so suggests it's a variant. Does not seem to be KTurtle, POOL, UCBLogo. QLogo, FMSLogo, and then I got bored searching. --[[Special:Contributions/172.69.71.91|172.69.71.91]] 00:37, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
:In the automatic transcription it has "Two cubic colon X one colon Y one colon X two"... which would be TO CUBIC :X1 :Y1 :X2 ... so it is defined above. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.107.230|162.158.107.230]] 01:15, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
:: Yes, some of the commands seem to be defined at the top. CUBIC at the top, SQUARE maybe somewhere else. So a shortcut to decyphering it might be to just extract and render all the cubes from the "CUBIC" and "SQUARE" commands, given their values. But what format are the cubes? Are they even the coordinates of cubes? For both commands, the six numbers seem to be in the format A B A B A B where the As and Bs are similar or even in some cases identical, which seems a strange thing for a cube:
<blockquote><pre>
SetXY -443 412
PenDown
Square -443 405 -443 397 -444 390
</pre></blockquote>
The definition seems to be something like:
<blockquote><pre>
ToCubic : X1 : Y1 : X2 : Y2 : Ex : Ey --- Parameter definitions?
local Make " X0 XCor --- Local variable definitions?
Local Make " Y0 YCor
Local Make " ErrX1 Lerp : X0 : X 0.25
local Make " ErrY1 Lerp : Y0 : Ey 0.25
Local Make " ErrX2 Lerp : X0 : Ex 0.75
Local Make " ErrY2 Lerp : Y0 : Ey 0.75
IfElse
Or
LessP : picks error Dist : ErrX1 : ErrY1 : X1 : Y1
LessP : picks error Dist : ErrX2 : ErrY2 : X2 : Y2
[
Local Make " Qx0 mix : X0 : X1
Local Make " Qy0 mix : Y0 : Y1
Local Make " Qx1 mix : X1 : X2
Local Make " qy1 Mix : Y1 : Y2
Local Make " Qx2 mix : X2 : EX
Local Make " Qy2 mix : Y2 : Ey
Local Make " Lx0 mix : Qx0 : QX1
Local Make " Ly0 mix : Qy0 : QY1
Local Make " Lx1 Mix : Qx1 : Qx2
Local Make " Ly1 Mix : qy1 : Q
Local Make " PmX Mix : Lx0 : Lx1
Local Make " PmY Mix : Ly0 : LY1
Cubic : Qx0 : qy0 : Lx0 : Ly0 : PmX : PmY
Cubic : Lx1 : Ly1 : Qx2 : Qy2 : Ex : Ey
]
[
SetXY : Ex : Ey
]
</pre></blockquote>
Least, that's what it sounds like, but I suspect round brackets and suchlike are not spoken aloud :( --[[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.95|108.162.221.95]] 01:54, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

: Maybe it's implementing a cubic spline interpolation, not a tridimensional cube. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.131.214|172.70.131.214]] 11:08, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Feels like the speech processing is lossy, so generating the code will be a lengthy labor of love transcribing it, then debugging it, trying to fill the gaps. The code may also have been fed through an automated "Bob Ross filter" which may have lost even more data. --[[Special:Contributions/172.69.71.91|172.69.71.91]] 00:37, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

About a quarter of the way into the text is the line "You know, I'm beginning to suspect it's turtles all the way down!" [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.215|162.158.78.215]] 00:46, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

it's concerning that the only real way we'll be able to figure this comic out is to compile the entire 9 hour computer-generated voice speech. [[User:Lettherebedarklight|youtube.com/watch?v=miLcaqq2Zpk]] ([[User talk:Lettherebedarklight|talk]]) 01:40, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
:Anyone actually doing any transcribing of this audio text is a true April Fools' fool, hence the reason to release this on April 1st. But I'd still like to see what the Fools' come up with :-D --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 21:26, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I'm moving all things about audio transcription here: [[2601: Instructions/Audio Transcript]], both the real transcript and peoples very long comments in the main discussion, to keep the main page short and keep loading time down. The comments from here go in the [[Talk:2601: Instructions/Audio Transcript|discussion]] for that page --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 20:35, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

OMG, fond memories of LOGO! I'm in a loud bar at the moment so I can't listen, and I'm not listening to NINE HOURS anyway, LOL! Everybody DOES realize, someone needs to extract the program and run it in LOGO, right? I would guarantee this draws something interesting and/or stupid. :) [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 03:27, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I found a [https://github.com/theinternetftw/xkcd2601 GitHub Repository] for transcription. May be of use to you guys for adding more info and citations to this Wiki. By the way, I didn't know this wiki existed. I don't want to create an account for it right now so good luck guys ;-; 04:12, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I tried running some code through "ucblogo" on a Linux distro, but didn't get very far with it. ---Tim 04:16, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Given that the audio is generated by text-to-speech, could a source-aware speech-to-text work better (fewer errors and less manual correction) than a generic one? For example, finding the right text-to-speech, extracting a sound for each phoneme, and then searching for near-identical snippets of waveform, seems like it could potentially be more reliable than the generic neural nets which are primarily trained for real human speech. Or even training a neural net on the same text-to-speech source, with a big block of sample data, if that would help distinguish homophones. Presumably someone here is good enough at this sort of thing to try that? [[User:Sqek|Sqek]] ([[User talk:Sqek|talk]]) 10:05, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I think that the original comment at the top is the best approach. Using the speech-to-text data posted yesterday, and doing some simple regsubs, I can get it into good enough shape that I can proceed to transcribe the whole program by editing the file while listening to the audio, in real time. "In real time" means nine hours to correctly transcribe the whole thing. So any other approach would have to do better than nine hours. Plus if somebody put a little effort into organization, the transcription can be parallelized and so completed in nine hours / N transcribers. ---Tim [[Special:Contributions/172.70.38.41|172.70.38.41]] 13:10, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I was helping with this last night, and here are the major steps we've done to interpret the code and who has helped, I think.
* [[User:Pgn674|Pgn674]] Used AWS to make a transcription of the audio, which we have been building from
* [[Special:Contributions/172.68.118.59|172.68.118.59]] Transcribed the critical functions at the top of the transcription
* [https://github.com/theinternetftw theinternetftw] Found a working interpreter and set up a collaboration space at [https://github.com/theinternetftw/xkcd2601 a GitHub repo], and has since been maintaining the code
* [https://github.com/theinternetftw theinternetftw] Also transcribed the first hour and got us our view of a partial picture
* [https://github.com/somebody1234 somebody1234] Got a messy but runnable version of the entire transcription and a view of the entire picture with errors
* Many people are transcribing bits of audio and submitting to GitHub. Here is the list of [https://github.com/theinternetftw/xkcd2601/graphs/contributors contributors]
[[User:Mannerisky|Mannerisky]] ([[User talk:Mannerisky|talk]]) 15:06, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I have changed the image to that which is seen on xkcd when loading the comic. It has not been updated on this page yet as of when I write this. But the turtle is of course not the comic, but a placeholder for those webcrawlers that would fail when trying to download the radio button. I have also added info on this in the current explanation. As I have made a link to a new sub page for the looong audio transcript and removed all of that from this page and discussion and put it here: [[2601: Instructions/Audio Transcript]] --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 21:38, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I started planning to write some code to figure this out, but moved on to other things after a few hours, due to psychological issues I have. The draft just runs the audio through the start of a random speech to text model. I trained a tokenizer around the logo code but didn't move farther. There are a lot of possible next steps, some of which others have mentioned. A simple approach would be to finetune the model around the hand-transcribed data. https://colab.research.google.com/gist/xloem/4310a26b6c9d13adac14307b948157d3/untitled4.ipynb [[Special:Contributions/172.70.114.147|172.70.114.147]] 23:04, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Any plans to exkcd the "real" comic that gets drawn by the LOGO code in the audio? I mean, I recognize, e. g., the Mars rover and Ursa Major, but what's the significance of the vacuum decay here, for instance? [[User:Nitpicking|Nitpicking]] ([[User talk:Nitpicking|talk]]) 01:18, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
:Now that the project is complete, we should add the resulting image on this page (not just a link to github). It'll be what folks are looking for first. And then we can start identifying the many references in the picture and turtle quotes. [[User:Mannerisky|Mannerisky]] ([[User talk:Mannerisky|talk]]) 04:26, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
::well, i added the picture. [[User:Lettherebedarklight|youtube.com/watch?v=miLcaqq2Zpk]] ([[User talk:Lettherebedarklight|talk]]) 08:08, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

It was wonderful watching all of this unfold. Great work everyone. I don't have an account here, nor on github, but I thought I'd mention that the makesvg.py uses the ':=' operator which was introduced in python 3.8. Not all of us have it on our creaky old machines. Maybe add a comment in the usage at the top of the file? Or better, refactor the .py?
-- [[Special:Contributions/172.70.100.4|172.70.100.4]] 14:39, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

Is there a trick to making it work? I've tried both Firefox and Chrome. I hear the narration and can toggle the mute, but it never draws the picture for me. I have enabled JavaScript and I have disabled Privacy Badger, NoSCript, and uBlock Origin and still no joy. I did find the final drawing so I've seen the animation via GIF. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.221|108.162.221.221]]

Talk:292: goto

2014-10-24T02:48:07Z

108.162.221.221: Just a comment

Note that the concept of ''goto being harmful'' fortunately is weaning a little.
Jumping forwards in code to the end where error handling is implemented is actually in wider use now; including many locations in the Linux kernel. [[User:Kaa-ching|Kaa-ching]] ([[User talk:Kaa-ching|talk]]) 09:53, 9 September 2012 (UTC)
:Actually, ''goto'' has been used quite with some frequency in low-level code in C programming over the years, so it's not altogether surprising that it is used in the Linux kernel, or any other tight bit of code. Given the "advance" of programming languages, I wouldn't say that there's been any weaning, except off of the concept of an unstructured goto in more recent languages. Admittedly, there's a schism between the low-level (that is, near-to-assembly) coders who more readily use ''goto'' because in the end, that's what the compiler reduces code branching down to, and developers using higher-level languages (that is, more highly abstracted, more removed from ''1 statement ~ 1 machine instruction'' languages) avoiding such because alternative structures abound, making ''goto'' somewhat unnecessary. There has been a bit of a dogmatic approach to teaching various languages, as in "thou shalt not use ''goto'' lest thou produce monsterous, unmaintainable code!" applied that many if not most developers observe; the humor in the panel is that this dogma is manifested in the appearance of a literal monster (a velociraptor, no less...) -- [[User:IronyChef|IronyChef]] ([[User talk:IronyChef|talk]]) 05:08, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
::From an historical perspective, in the 80's, back when BASIC was the norm for developing proggies on home computers, because code blocks (begin...end, { ... }, etc.) were nonexistent, one had the option of two keywords: GOTO and GOSUB. In the case of branching beyond code that wasn't executed, many programmers abused GOTO even beyond the necessity of its use. This was a fairly hot topic in home-computing magazines at the time, again with BASIC in mind, and it appears that developers using C, [Turbo] Pascal and the like, having hangups about BASIC, emitted serious frowns at the idea of using GOTO at all. But for quick jumps that avoid having to tab forward entire blocks of code, GOTO (case notwithstanding) certainly has my support. [[User:Thokling|Thokling]] ([[User talk:Thokling|talk]]) 16:05, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
:"Jumping forwards in code to the end where error handling is implemented is actually in wider use now [...]" try-catch-finally? Syntactically not a goto but the effect can be similar. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.219.47|108.162.219.47]] 17:58, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
::Yeah, in most high-level languages exception handeling is preffered to goto. But some lower-level languages like C don't have that construct. Note that exception handling allows to go straight from inside a function to the error-handling code outside the function, which is an advantage over C-style error handling which usually require you to check the return value of every function in case you got a specialized "error code".[[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.228|141.101.99.228]] 19:46, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
:::You actually can throw true exceptions in C, but without the syntactic sugar it's tedious (a lot more code), confusing (what the hell does this do?) and error prone (one could easily just wind up going to the start of the try block again, rather then going to the catch block). Also a throws and catch in the same function/method is generally frowned up for the same reasons as GOTO.--[[Special:Contributions/108.162.238.224|108.162.238.224]] 16:48, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

"Velociraptors are a running joke..." Ha, I get it [[Special:Contributions/79.169.177.15|79.169.177.15]] 13:06, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
*Shudder* I can't even imagine just how horrible the spaghetti code produced by goto's could be (or what the optimist would call "a code puzzle"). [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.221|108.162.221.221]] 02:48, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Talk:1418: Horse

2014-10-17T16:19:19Z

108.162.221.221: added firefox .xpi file that changes Force to horse

*May the horse be with you Luke.
*The horse is strong with this one.
*I felt a tremor in the horse.
Why did he forget SW. That is not like Randall ;) [[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 08:50, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
: I gotta think maybe Randall's making a subtle statement that Star Wars just ain't so relevant these days... [[User:KieferSkunk|KieferSkunk]] ([[User talk:KieferSkunk|talk]]) 21:50, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

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Following up on the title text... "Why was he suspended?" "Due to allegations of excessive horse."

[[Special:Contributions/173.245.56.201|173.245.56.201]] 09:01, 8 September 2014 (UTC) Siuntio

So I linked it to the old substitutions page - gjgfuj [[Special:Contributions/108.162.250.219|108.162.250.219]] 10:05, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Like the "Clouds-to-butts" plugin for Chrome. {{unsigned ip|108.162.249.231}}
:More information in Reddit [http://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/24odjt/cloud_to_butts_extension/]. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.201|108.162.221.201]] 14:16, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

I added a modified version of Cloud-to-Butt plugin [https://www.dropbox.com/s/0mswga09c5uf9h4/cloud2butt2.xpi?dl=0 to my dropbox]. All credit for coding/programming goes to [https://github.com/DaveRandom/cloud-to-butt-mozilla Steven Frank], its creator - I just unpacked the XPI file, added the Horse->Horse and horse->horse text replacement (while of course still keeping "the cloud" going to "my butt" because that is awesome) and then repacked it. You can install it in Firefox like any other .XPI file. Enjoy! [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.221|108.162.221.221]] 16:19, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

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Would it be funny the other way?
*The horse population has been in decline sine the industrial revolution
*Rules of polo: You need a horse.
*People do not like it when there is horse in their beef.
I do ;) —[[User:Artyer|Artyer]] ([[User talk:Artyer|talk]]) 18:33, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

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Correctforcebatterystaple [[Special:Contributions/173.245.56.163|173.245.56.163]] 22:18, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

I originally (earlier today) read it as "Iraqi Air [FH]orse grow'''l'''ing"... Which made less sense than I'd have expected, but I couldn't unread it until just now. Still surreal, but at least not outright Dada[[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.233|141.101.98.233]] 00:21, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

"A police horse is a constituted body of persons empowered by the state to enhorse the law, protect property, and limit civil disorder. (...) Law enhorsement, however, constitutes only part of policing activity." --[[Special:Contributions/141.101.104.161|141.101.104.161]] 07:21, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

maybe the officer suspended from horse was a reference to the police officer who shot a black person? [[Special:Contributions/108.162.254.106|108.162.254.106]] 07:39, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Aqua teen hunger horse. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.246.226|108.162.246.226]] 00:54, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

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I had previously posted a grumpy comment here (now removed) --[[User:Pudder|Pudder]] ([[User talk:Pudder|talk]]) 07:38, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
:Sorry, but that's totally wrong. The discussion section is meant to replace what used to be the old blog's comments section, and is for any discussion relevant to the comic. If you're new here, there's a section on the main page titled "New Here?" which explains the basics of explainxkcd, and it's worth checking out. It also lists the handful of rules we have, including the fact that the discussion page is for talking about the comic. [[User:Az|Az]] ([[User talk:Az|talk]]) 06:59, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
::Sorry about that, and thanks for the pointer. --[[User:Pudder|Pudder]] ([[User talk:Pudder|talk]]) 07:38, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

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Explanation Quarks:
Sorry, could not resist... [[User:Tier666|Tier666]] ([[User talk:Tier666|talk]]) 11:39, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

How about the portion of the Police Horse who are on forceback? {{unsigned ip|173.245.52.170}}

Last time XKCD featured one of these text replacements, people started posting scripts for implementing the text replacement automatically in browsers. I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet. [[User:Diszy|Diszy]] ([[User talk:Diszy|talk]]) 22:03, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

http://bitcoinshell.mooo.com/users/noiob/dev/horse.user.js Here you go. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.104.179|141.101.104.179]] 16:26, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

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Interestingly, a sound change from an initial /f/ to /h/ happened in the evolution of Spanish. Examples: fornax --> horno, ferrum --> hierro, factus --> hecho. Of course, all h's subsequently went silent. {{unsigned ip|108.162.221.171}}

Talk:160: Penny Arcade Parody

2014-09-28T03:10:20Z

108.162.221.221:

Is this supposed to be the beginning of a porno fanfic or something? [[User:Diszy|Diszy]] ([[User talk:Diszy|talk]]) 18:04, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

I think this is more poking fun at Jerry Holkins's (Tycho's) writing style. A news post from Holkins always accompanies each comic strip with a sometimes-explanation of the events in the strip and recent bit of interesting news. Jerry's writing, while rich and varied, can sometimes seem like purple prose.