44 posts
NandGame – Build a computer from scratch. –An educational puzzle game. Solve a series of tasks where you build increasingly powerful components. Starts with the simplest logical components and ends up with a programmable computer.
You’re the OS! –Become a computer operating system and try not to anger the user!
A non-mathematical introduction to Kalman Filters for programmers – Pravesh Koirala –Read my manifesto on Code as an alternative to Mathematics. Code for this article can be found on this Colab Notebook should you choose to follow along. Why Kalman Filters? Kalman filters are ingenius. If you have never heard of them, then a very intuitive (and arguably reductive) way to think about them is to
Memory Allocation –For those of you learning C or C++, this article is a great and detailed tutorial. Also useful if you are studying operating systems.
Tell me how this is simple word completion. Can this be broadened to a more complicated network. Could it be used for some kind of semi-intelligent navigation?
Prompt:
Assume a map that is described in sentences, with node names and costs to go between nodes. Here is map1:
Node A costs 5 to got to Node C and 10 to go to Node D Node C costs 100 to go to node E and 50 to go to node F Node D costs 10 to go to node E and 100 to go to node F
What is the best route to go from Node A to node E? And what is the best route to go from Node A to node F?
Response:
To find the best route from Node A to Node E, we need...
Line maze algorithm –If you are experimenting with Robots and want to solve an intricate maze that has lines. this articles has some good insights and algorithms.
Some possible reasons for 8-bit bytes –An interesting walk down history lane… of computers
The Missing Semester of Your CS Education –Classes teach you all about advanced topics within CS, from operating systems to machine learning, but there’s one critical subject that’s rarely covered, and is instead left to students to figure out on their own: proficiency with their tools. We’ll teach you how to master the command-line, use a powerful text editor, use fancy features of version control systems, and much more!
Laurence Tratt: Why We Need to Know LR and Recursive Descent Parsing Techniques –Nice article about something I learned and actually really enjoyed in college but havet thought much about over the years. All about top down and bottom up parsers. About unambiguous and ambiguius grammars. About LR and recursive descent parsers. And more…
A Nibble of Geohashes in Go – by Kurt – Get Code –This is a really cool algorithm that i never heard of. Also geohashes are not too hard to compute and have very useful and unteresting properties. the concept of a z-order curve is explained. That too is a useful model and concept. The author says: “Latitude and longitude as a locality-preserving string.”
A Complete Guide to Lock Convoys | Dave Kilian’s Blog –A very interesting concept and scenario that affects scale in surprising ways. In the category of everything old is nee again, this was identified and named back in the 1970’s!
A Nibble of Content-Defined Chunking –A great explanation of a really cool algorithm. “How de-duplicated, incremental file transfer works “
The What, the Why, and the How of Bloom Filter – The Lean Software Boutique –Have you ever wondered how does Medium recommend blogs to read or how does a platform with millions of users tells if a username is available or ta…
Things You Should Know About Databases– Things You Should Know About Indexes and Transactions. This post covers internal workings of indexes and transactions of RDBMSs.
Algorithms from scratch: RANSAC: RANSAC stands for Random Sample Consensus. In my opinion, it is the best type of algorithm: simple but very powerful and useful. It is…
Engineering & Computer Science – Google Scholar Metrics Great list of top publications April 14, 2022 at 10:28PM
Kalman Filter: An Algorithm for making sense from the insights of various sensors fused together. An Algorithm that is an Astrologer for the Sensor fusion process.It can predict a estimate for you and would correct itself if its… April 4, 2022 at 05:01PM
Aho/Ullman Foundations of Computer Science This book has been taken out of print by W. H. Freeman. You are welcome to use it if you like. We believed in 1992 it was the way to introduce theory in Computer Science, and we believe that today. January 28, 2022 at 03:29PM
Minimax algorithm and alpha-beta pruning This article will teach you about the minimax algorithm and alpha-beta pruning, from a beginner’s perspective. November 27, 2021 at 07:32PM
WikiCFP : Call For Papers of Conferences, Workshops and Journals A Wiki website of Calls For Papers (CFP) of international conferences, workshops, meetings, seminars, events, journals and book chapters in computer science, communications, software engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning, networking, signal processing, systems etc.
Design follows data structures
If you’re interested in algorithms, optimization and big-O you will like this.
tags: optimization bigo design datastructures
There are lots of algorithm libraries. This one is a nice one!
tags: algorithms computer science
Check out this article that shows off how visualizations can help you understand how algorithms work. It’s an amazing piece of work: Creatively, he figured out how to illustrate an algorithm so I can better understand how it works; Technically, the code that implements these visualizations is itself very clever and elegant; and Aesthetically, the overall effect on the page itself is quite beautiful. I am jealous!
Check out this really interesting article plus lovely animations. I have to go find out how it actually implements the animations. Even though the examples are in Python, what is actually embedded into the page? We shall see!
Visualizing Alghorithms
Kirk McDonald: Sorry, College Grads, I Probably Won’t Hire You – WSJ.com:
According to one recent report, in the next decade American colleges will mint 40,000 graduates with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, though the U.S. economy is slated to create 120,000 computing jobs that require such degrees.
Now, I don’t know where this gentleman, Kirk McDonald got this statistic but if you are teaching computer science then it’s a pretty sobering statistic. I am going to try digging deeper to see if I can find the source.
Under the header “Natural Gas News Leak” (funny) there’s a story about how the securities market reacted 400ms before a bit of news came out of the government and they reacted by trading on the news. The article has lots of charts and graphs which may say whether or how much money was made or lost. The article says:
“It is worth pointing out that the EIA Natural Gas Report comes out weekly (every Thursday at 10:30) and the market reacts within a few milliseconds. This is because the report centers on one number which makes it easy for machines to process and take action.” (from Nanex.net)
One of the tensions that I have seen in teaching software engineering is whether something should be viewed as legitimate research or part of the craft of computer engineering.
It’s a slippery slope that I myself didn’t have a good articulation for.
I came across this in a newsgroup which I think is a pretty good description. The writer is referring to Researching Information Systems and Computing...
Does Google give a different answer if you reorder the words in the search? What? A trivial question? Have you ever tried to refine a search by reordering the words? Wouldn’t it be useful if you knew for sure that it would or would not make a difference?
Experiment:
ruby rails bureaucrat gem examples rails bureaucrat gem examples ruby These two searches indeed did produce different results! And not just a reordering of the results. There were at least two results in the top 7 which were present in one and not the other.
Q.E.D.
I remember wondering about this when I was in college — this is before I really knew anything about computers.
I noticed that our computer center charged by the minute of processor time and it was a lot! I remember people freaking out because their random prime number generator ran overnight and the department got billed an unexpected $1,000.00. And they were in trouble!
So it must cost a lot to get these computers to do all these calculations, I thought. So, I asked the local expert, how much does it cost, then, when the computer isn’t doing any calculations? He laughed. He said, it costs the same, whether it’s calculating or not. How weird.
Here’s an interesting ...
Great review article:
“In this article I digested a number of MapReduce patterns and algorithms to give a systematic view of the different techniques that can be found in the web or scientific articles. Several practical case studies are also provided. All descriptions and code snippets use the standard Hadoopâs MapReduce model with Mappers, Reduces, Combiners, Partitioners, and sorting. This framework is depicted in the figure below.” (from Highly Scalable)
Worth reading if you are interested in how Hadoop and friends might apply to the problems that you are trying to solve: “MapReduce Patterns, Algorithms, and Use Cases”
If you are interested in design and especially design and architecture of software, and you have a philosophical bent, you will enjoy this essay… I can’t even attempt to summarize it’s content, and even the abstract from the paper itself is quite inscrutable:
“Conceptual integrity arises not (simply) from one mind or from a small number of agreeing resonant minds, but from sometimes hidden co-authors and the thing designed itself.” (From Designed As Designer)
What can I tell you. The author is the Richard Gabriel, a luminary of the computer world. Here’s the article: Designed as Designer.
Fun article about Ben Hescott who has some unique – and impressive – approaches to teaching an abstract topic:
Q. Did you experience an “aha’’ teaching moment?
A. My first time teaching, I was using PowerPoint slides. One student kept saying, “I don’t see it.’’ So I turned off the computer, grabbed a piece of chalk, and went through the material slowly on the blackboard, without notes. Afterward, the kid said, “You’re a really good teacher when you’re not using PowerPoint.’’ That changed everything.” (from The Boston Globe)
You have to read the whole interview!
Over the last several months I’ve been following a series of blog postings by Jamis Buckon the esoteric and quirky topic of writing programs to design mazes.
For reasons that are not clear, Jamis developed an obsession with mazes and has collected a series of articles detailing many different algorithms, their tradeoffs and concepts and writing them up beautifully.
Today in his final installment he summarized the project:
Over the last six weeks I documented eleven different maze generation algorithms. It’s been a blast. I’ve had so much fun researching and implementing these! It’s bee...
The article “Reflections on Trusting Trust” is often mentioned in conversation and cited. I finally tracked down and read this classic, and it is indeed a classic of computer science. And typically for classics, it’s short, clear, readable and impactful: “The moral is obvious. You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ peoplelike me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.” (from Reflections on Trusting Trust)
The other day I came across this article in the Boston Globe about one of the greats of Computer Science, Seymour Papert, inventor of the seminal Logo programming language and many other important accomplishments. “He was long a jewel of the MIT faculty. Now, after a devastating brain injury, mathematician Seymour Papert is struggling bravely to learn again how to think like, speak like, be like the man of genius he was.” (from In Search of a Beautiful Mind, The Boston Globe)
Hard to believe that I hadn’t heard of it before. So Sad. Read the whole article, it’s worthwhile.
Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software gave an outstanding talk at Yale which he has written up on his blog. For budding Computer Science majors, people getting into the computer world or business, there is a lot of good wisdom to be found here: My favorite passage is the discussion about the value put on software, from the perspective of those who are involved in creating it. Here’s how he introduces the topic, but you should really read the whole thing:
“Currently, in the battle between the geeks and the suits, the suits are winning, because they control the budget, and honestly, I don’t know if that’s such a bad thing. The suits recognize that there are diminishing returns to f...
Check out this post from dzone.com: latest front page:
I just finished a fantastic book called "Algorithms", by Sanjoy Dasgupta, Christos Papadimitriou and Umesh Vazirani. Even better: this book is free and can be downloaded in PDF form from the authors’ web site.
Looks like this is practically an online book on the topic. Also, WikiPedia has a detailed entry on the subject. (Via Digg)
Technorati Tags: crypto
Interesting and amusing little article from ACM Queue:
“One of the students, Jeremy Stribling, explains how they had developed a computer program to generate random sequences of technobabble in order to confirm their suspicions that papers of dubious academicity were bypassing serious, or indeed, any scrutiny. In fact, the students claim ulterior, financial motives behind this lack of proper peer review.” (from Call That Gibberish?)
Technorati Tags: funny, interesting