Thanks for the encouragement! Doing this was pretty exciting. > and I didn't really consult any literature either In hindsight I shouldn't have written that,

Thanks for the encouragement! Doing this was pretty exciting. > and I didn't really consult any literature either In hindsight I shouldn't have written that, because it practically forces people to ignore the project itself and begin suggesting emergency reading material to the illiterate goof who wrote this thing (a.k.a. me). I want to clarify: it's not that I have no clue how anything works, I just didn't study up especially for this project. There is a continuum ranging from absolutely no prior knowledge, to some intellectual contamination, up to just aping established methods because you couldn't imagine doing things any other way. I was probably somewhere around the middle when I started this and it's not a bad place to be. In fact, I'd go so far as to recommend this as a good perspective for anyone who wants to try something similar. Learning "how it's done" beforehand not only defeats the point of the exercise, it also results in a lot of projects that are strikingly monocultural. Now that I have a better understanding of the problem space, I imagine I will read more on these topics. I'm excited to find out how others have approached some of the problems I struggled with. So thanks for suggesting the Dragon Book, which I haven't read yet (as opposed to SICP on which I already commented)!