93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs, Study Finds
93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019)
Colin McMillen's SIGBOVIK paper answers a long-standing question: can you smear paint on a wall without creating valid Perl? Using OCR on 100 splatters, he finds 93% parse as valid Perl, with seven counterexamples. The paper, accepted for SIGBOVIK 2019, includes a gallery of splatters and their Perl code, and won an Unwitting Participation Ribbon for including a genuine artifact.
We answer this question in the affirmative: it is possible to smear paint on the wall without creating a valid Perl program.