Week 10: The End of the Beginning
Adam P -
Greetings again for the last time. As this is my final blog post, I will discuss what I’ve done and my plans for the project going forward. I finished the algorithm this week, at least to a basic level of functionality. There are more trivial features I am currently working on adding like the ability to find a character’s age during any event and like having the computer display each step of its process, but the algorithm as it exists now does work for most stories. I’m sure there will always be more natural language I have to account for within the logic of my algorithm, but the most common expressions of the passage time are all covered, including character ages, how much time has passed, and information about the date. Everything said in the novel Leaf Storm is accounted for, as this is what I used to test the algorithm.
As I continue development of my program and integrate it to a website, I will need to develop a database to store all the lists I talked about in the last post and store them for each instance of a timeline, which I must find a way to link to user accounts. I’ll also need to replace the command structure I coded for translating user input to computer logic with sets of buttons and boxes that users would typically use on a website. That, I suspect, will be far easier than coding the algorithm.
To expand the algorithm’s functionality for stories that do not use the Gregorian calendar, I will need to adjust how it builds lists of days in a year, though that should not be too difficult. The greater challenge is replacing the datetime module, which only supports the Gregorian system. I currently use it to identify continuous periods of time after the algorithm finishes narrowing down possible dates. For alternative calendars, I will need a different method to detect and display continuous time ranges in a readable format instead of listing every individual day. I first encountered this issue while testing a basic Star Wars timeline that spans over 25,000 years. The datetime module could not handle a date it interpreted as being around the year 27,000.
I enjoyed working on this project quite a lot. I may not have been able to complete the website within the duration of the Senior Project, but I at least got the hard part out of the way. I’ve had aspirations of making something like this for years now, and seeing it actually working really feels too good to be true. I hope to have the first version of the website working by 2026. I haven’t decided on a name yet, but I hope it’s something easy to remember.
To any readers who made it this far, thank you.
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