Luke Swartz's Home Page: The GB-Wocky

The GB-wocky This poem, one of many parodies of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky nonsense poem, substitutes a number of nonsense-sounding terms from Cognitive Science--specifically, the version cooked up at Stanford called Symbolic Systems. If you're one of the 99.99% of people in the world who haven't taken the Sym Sys core, you may want to see the annotated version. 'Twas lemma, and the Turing Test
Did parse and recurse in the stack;
All merge sort were the qualias
And the SYN-SEM-STRUC hack.

"Beware the GB-wock, my son!
The X-bar nodes, the words that trace!
Beware the CFG, and shun
The nativist base case!"

He took his (char *) sword in hand;
Long time the lexeme foe he sought--
So rested he by the depth-first tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in dative thought he stood,
The GB-wock, with eyes of flame,
Came priming through the dualist wood,
And compiled as it came!

One two! One two! And through and through
The (char *) blade went neural net!
He left it dead, and with its HEAD
He went truth-tabling back.

"And hast thou slain the GB-wock?
Come to my arms, my big-O boy!
O BST! NP! Tarski!"
He dir-graphed in his joy.

'Twas lemma, and the Turing Test
Did parse and recurse in the stack;
All merge sort were the qualias
And the SYN-SEM-STRUC hack.

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