Q1: Acorn Finder
The squirrels on campus need your help! There are a lot of trees on campus and the squirrels would like to know which ones contain acorns. Define the function acorn_finder, which takes in a tree and returns True if the tree contains a node with the value ‘acorn’ and False otherwise.
1 | def acorn_finder(t): |
Q2: Pruning Leaves
Define a function prune_leaves
that given a tree t
and a tuple of values vals
, produces a version of t
with all its leaves that are in vals
removed. Do not attempt to try to remove non-leaf nodes and do not remove leaves that do not match any of the items in vals
. Return None
if pruning the tree results in there being no nodes left in the tree.
1 | def prune_leaves(t, vals): |
Q3: Memory
Write a function that takes in a number n and returns a one-argument function. The returned function takes in a function that is used to update n. It prints the updated n value. (Note that this is different from a commentary function from hog since it doesn’t return a new function)
1 | def memory(n): |
Shakespeare and Dictionaries
We will use dictionaries to approximate the entire works of Shakespeare! We’re going to use a bigram language model. Here’s the idea: We start with some word – we’ll use “The” as an example. Then we look through all of the texts of Shakespeare and for every instance of “The” we record the word that follows “The” and add it to a list, known as the successors of “The”. Now suppose we’ve done this for every word Shakespeare has used, ever.
Let’s go back to “The”. Now, we randomly choose a word from this list, say “cat”. Then we look up the successors of “cat” and randomly choose a word from that list, and we continue this process. This eventually will terminate in a period (“.”) and we will have generated a Shakespearean sentence!
The object that we’ll be looking things up in is called a “successor table”, although really it’s just a dictionary. The keys in this dictionary are words, and the values are lists of successors to those words.
Q4: Successor Tables
Here’s an incomplete definition of the build_successors_table
function. The input is a list of words (corresponding to a Shakespearean text), and the output is a successors table. (By default, the first word is a successor to “.”). See the example below.
1 | def build_successors_table(tokens): |
Q5: Construct the Sentence
Let’s generate some sentences! Suppose we’re given a starting word. We can look up this word in our table to find its list of successors, and then randomly select a word from this list to be the next word in the sentence. Then we just repeat until we reach some ending punctuation.
Hint: to randomly select from a list, import the Python random library with import random
and use the expression random.choice(my_list)
This might not be a bad time to play around with adding strings together as well. Let’s fill in the construct_sent function!
1 | def construct_sent(word, table): |
Putting it all together
Great! Now let’s try to run our functions with some actual data. The following snippet included in the skeleton code will return a list containing the words in all of the works of Shakespeare.
Warning: Do NOT try to print the return result of this function.
1 | def shakespeare_tokens(path='shakespeare.txt', url='http://composingprograms.com/shakespeare.txt'): |
Uncomment the following two lines to run the above function and build the successors table from those tokens.
1 | # Uncomment the following two lines |
Next, let’s define a utility function that constructs sentences from this successors table:
1 | >>> def sent(): |
Notice that all the sentences start with the word “The”. With a few modifications, we can make our sentences start with a random word. The following random_sent function (defined in your starter file) will do the trick:
1 | def random_sent(): |
Go ahead and load your file into Python (be sure to use the -i
flag). You can now call the random_sent
function to generate random Shakespearean sentences!
1 | >>> random_sent() |
More Trees Practice
Q6: Sprout leaves
Define a function sprout_leaves
that takes in a tree, t
, and a list of values, vals
. It produces a new tree that is identical to t
, but where each old leaf node has new branches, one for each value in vals
.
For example, say we have the tree t = tree(1, [tree(2), tree(3, [tree(4)])])
:
1 | 1 |
If we call sprout_leaves(t, [5, 6])
, the result is the following tree:
1 | 1 |
1 | def sprout_leaves(t, vals): |
Q7: Add trees
Define the function add_trees
, which takes in two trees and returns a new tree where each corresponding node from the first tree is added with the node from the second tree. If a node at any particular position is present in one tree but not the other, it should be present in the new tree as well.
*Hint: You may want to use the built-in zip function to iterate over multiple sequences at once.
Note: If you feel that this one’s a lot harder than the previous tree problems, that’s totally fine! This is a pretty difficult problem, but you can do it! Talk about it with other students, and come back to it if you need to.*
1 | def add_trees(t1, t2): |