About Us
Our story
We are Pal's Lab, a team of 10 eager computer science students, working together on our graduation project. The project includes making a package in Haskell, a unique tool for finding palindromes, and connecting this to a website, and a desktop application.
This project, and website, is made on behalf of our client, prof.
Johan Jeuring, who started this project years ago as a hobby. He
developed an early version of a palindrome-finding algorithm
package in Haskell. As part of our graduation project, concluding
our bachelor, we delivered an up-to-date, remodeled version of
this package, helping the client with his research on palindromes.
This package contains a linear algorithm, as well as two quadratic
algorithms. These quadratic algorithms offer support for
approximate palindromes.
Around this, we built a website and a desktop application, with a
database connected so the client can see what palindromes are
found by users. Lastly, we created two other packages, which can
convert Latin and Greek text respectfully into usable text, so it
can be used for the package to analyze.
Why find palindromes?
Finding palindromes is interesting, because of various reasons.
Firstly, ever since humanity started writing, they have written palindromes. The first palindromes were written approximately 3000 years ago.
Another reason is that palindromes have played a significant historical role in computer science. They're often used as examples in books on the theory of formal languages, and to demonstrate limitations of computational models. Many elegant algorithms have been developed to detect palindromes, one of which leading to the creation of the subfield "stringology."
The third reason relates to biology and human existence. DNA, which carries the data for building and repairing organisms, can get damaged. To fix broken DNA, cells use various repair mechanisms, including copies and repeated sequences. One of the most intruiging mechanisms, however, is the storage of information in palindromes. The Y-chromosome is the only chromosome in human DNA that doesn't have a copy. To still allow this DNA to repair itself, it contains palindromes to store information about it's own structure.