During the last year there were some discussions where Ruby has been used
already. There were couple of people who said something about their interest
to "academic" problems. 

I'd like to note that at [ruby-list:27016] Akimichi Tatsukawa announces
Genetic Programming library (at least Robert might be interested in). It has
been added also to RAA:

  http://www.ale.cx/mine/raa/raa-history-Library_AI.html#Ruby_GP

After 2 minutes code browsing it looks pretty neat. The docs are in
Japanese, but the code has comments in English and the samples are quite
clean.

The announcement could be read at

  http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-list/27016

or you might like to read it through the excite translation service:

http://www.excite.co.jp/world/url/?wb_url=http%3A%2F%2Fblade.nagaokaut.ac.jp
%2Fruby%2Fruby%2Dlist%2Findex.shtml&wb_lp=jaen-ATL

I'm sure Ruby is quite ideal language for exploring many problems academics
have to face every day. For example to test out ideas before hand optimized
assembly code is put in couple of very expensive computers to spit out the
final answers to whatever problem requiring intelligence.

	- Aleksi

(Ps. everybody probably knows the right answer to all problems, or at least
to most problems, is 42. In Ruby the program outputting the correct result
could be academically crafted for years and the final form will not be
completely different from ruby -e'p 42' making Ruby excellent choice.)