Re: automatic partwriter

[Urs Liska]

Hi David,

I just stumbled over this thread (basically when working on my mail 
server ;-) )
And although I didn't have the opportunity to look into all of this 
(hey, could you consider writing a blog post about it?) one though 
struck my mind. No idea whether it's worthwile but perhaps it gives you 
some inspiration.


Am 27.09.2017 um 04:59 schrieb David Nalesnik:
> One possible flaw is the way that I generate possible realizations.
> Basically, I look for all possible rule-obeying two-chord pairings
> between chords 1 and 2, then find all possible connections between
> chords 2 and 3 which dovetail with the found connections between 1 and
> 2, and so forth.  It's easy to see that this could lead to an overflow
> with a long progression or if there aren't plenty of rules to weed out
> as many branches of the tree as possible before they have the chance
> to propagate,

This very much reminds me of the - seemingly unrelated - experience I 
had with going through an "algorithms" course. Essentially what you are 
describing seems very similar to shortest-path graph algorithms, where 
the choice and implementation of an algorithm may (with large datasets) 
make the difference between getting a result in a few seconds or never 
in the current century.

I don't know whether there's any path towards a viable solution, but 
maybe it's worth looking at the problem through the lens of things like 
Dijkstra's algorithm and all of its improvements from the navigation 
software category?

Best
Urs