Mark-Jason Dominus' site appears to be down at the time of writing this node, but he did something similar with quilt patterns and turned it into a talk (of course). Ah, I just found the exact URL of the results on a Usenet archive.

Update 2003-09-11 22:19:03 CEST:The site appears to be back up, as many of you have noticed. But just in case:

Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl.moderated,comp.lang.perl.misc
Subject: Re: So what do YOU use Perl for?
References: <3ACFB415.63D2CA91@gmu.edu> <slrn9d02ft.ff7.tjla@thislove.
+dyndns.org>
Organization: Plover Systems Co.
From: mjd@plover.com (Mark Jason Dominus)
Message-ID: <3ad60451.2149$21a@news.op.net>

In article <slrn9d02ft.ff7.tjla@thislove.dyndns.org>,
Gwyn Judd <tjla@guvfybir.qlaqaf.bet> wrote:
>
>I use it to impress women.
>

Around 1993 or 1994 I started dating a woman who was a quilter.  After
seeing a lot of quilts and pictures of quilts, it seemed to me that
most quilters stuck to a few traditional quilt blocks and that there
might be a lot of quilt blocks that were rarely used.

I wrote a suite of Perl programs to generate all the quilt blocks of a
certain type (sixteen-patch half-square triangles with 90-degree
rotational symmetry) and printed out the result:

        http://www.plover.com/~mjd/misc/quilt/composites/bindexs.jpg

(I made an error; one block appears twice.  Can you find it?)

I was delighted, because the results confirmed my suspicion:  There
*are* a lot of excellent but rarely-seen quilt blocks.

I was delighted even further when we got married, she made the program
output into a real quilt and gave it to me as a wedding present.

        http://www.plover.com/~mjd/misc/quilt/quilt/

She must have been impressed.


-- 
@P=split//,".URRUU\c8R";@d=split//,"\nrekcah xinU / lreP rehtona tsuJ"
+;sub p{@p{"r$p","u$p"}=(P,P);pipe"r$p","u$p";++$p;($q*=2)+=$f=!fork;m
+ap{$P=$P[$f^ord
($p{$_})&6];$p{$_}=/^$P/ix?$P:close$_}keys%p}p;p;p;p;p;map{$p{$_}=~/^[
+P.]/&&close$_}%p;wait until$?;map{/^r/&&<$_>}%p;$_=$d[$q];sleep rand(
+2)if/\S/;print
[download]

--
Allolex