A few weekends ago I went to a dance camp called Pinewoods for the first time. Periodically people performed casually for everyone else, usually by playing instruments, singing, or dancing. In fact, I did a small poi performance and ended up teaching a lot of people how to do it in my downtime.
One fellow got up and sang “I’m My Own Grandpa.” It was the first time I heard the song, but I liked it a lot. It tells a story from the perspective of a guy who simply married a woman and through a complex sequence of marriages and births he becomes his own grandfather. Check out the video. It draws out the relationships visually so you can at least try to follow it all.
The folk song got me wondering whether anyone has ever tried demonstrating these complex relationships in Prolog, a programming language for satisfying constraints in a rule-based system. Perhaps the thought hit me because the stereotypical example for introducing people to these kinds of languages is modeling family trees and relationships between particular people.
After a short while curiously searching I found this Stackoverflow post. Apparently a computer science book published in 1976 was inspired by the song and is now inspiring Prolog teachers to assign the problem for homework. I like when some of my seemingly unrelated interests cross paths like that.
