Study Finds 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

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A 2019 technical write-up, published on a personal site tied to the SIGBOVIK humor conference, reports that roughly 93% of random paint splatter patterns can be interpreted as syntactically valid Perl programs. The article is available at mcmillen.dev, and the discussion thread on Hacker News received 11 points and 2 comments. The source text provided is brief and does not include the full methodology, so the specific details of how the analysis was conducted are not described here. The work appears to be a tongue-in-cheek research project rather than a serious scientific result. The original post is dated 2019 and was shared on Hacker News later.

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