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Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [ title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books…
I figured they, and others, could benefit from an explanation. The full details of an industrial-strength spell corrector are quite complex (you can read a little about it here or here ). But I figured that in the course of a transcontinental plane ride I could write and explain a toy spelling corrector that achieves…
Chomsky's remarks were in response to Steven Pinker's question about the success of probabilistic models trained with statistical methods. This essay is a response to Pinker and Chomsky, and will address these questions:
A Go board has 19 × 19 points, each of which can be empty or occupied by black or white, so there are 3 (19 × 19) ≅ 10 172 possible board positions, but "only" about 10 170 of those positions are legal. Here are some of them:
Why does this matter? As Steve Yegge said , "If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work." Yegge describes 8 problems that can be solved with compilers (or equally well with interpreters, or with Yegge's typical heavy dosage of cynicism).
Every square has exactly 3 units and 20 peers. For example, here are the units and peers for the square C2 :
Here's what we can do with today's computing power (using publicly available data and the processing power of my own personal computer; I'm not relying on access to corporate computing power):
It turns out my hopes were answered. First, Prechelt published another article that covers Tcl, Python, Perl, and Rexx. Also, Ron Garret (nee Erann Gat) did a follow-up study in which he asked programmers to write Prechelt's test program in Lisp. His results show that the resulting Lisp programs ran faster on average…
What's wrong with this picture? On the plus side, it captures a lot of smiles and has a sense of motion. On the minus side are some technical and artistic problems:
The tokens #t and #f are the True and False literals, respectively. The single quote mark serves to quote the following expression. The syntax ' exp is completely equivalent to (quote exp ) . The backquote character ` is called quasiquote in Scheme; it is similar to ' except that within a quasiquoted expression, the…
I looked into Python because I was considering translating the Lisp code for the Russell & Norvig AI textbook into Java. Some instructors and students wanted Java because
In July 1999, there was a news article stating that PC usage had doubled yet again, reaching penetration of 50% of homes. People were hailing this as yet another sign of the inevitable climb of technology, but I saw it as a warning sign that the glass was half empty, and coined the following:
Data files are derived from the Google Web Trillion Word Corpus , as described by Thorsten Brants and Alex Franz, and distributed by the Linguistic Data Consortium.
When an experimental study states "The group with treatment X had significantly less disease ( p = 1%)", many people interpret this statement as being equivalent to "there is a 99% chance that if I do treatment X it will prevent disease." This essay explains why these statements are not equivalent. For such an…
I've never been involved in a detective interview, but occasionally I'm interviewed by a journalist. Some publications use a quaint procedure known as fact checking ; for example, the New Yorker had a wonderful piece by John McPhee in their Feb. 9th issue on their fact-checking process. (My favorite part was about…
To demonstrate the problem, I did a simulation where I generated 480 random numbers per subject, representing the 480 time slices in the experiment. I repeated this generation of random numbers 20 times. I compared the send and no-send intervals of random numbers using a T-test; none of the 20 trials found a…
A question is infrequently answered either because few people know the answer or because it concerns an obscure, subtle point (but a point that may be crucial to you). I thought I had invented the term for my Java IAQ , but it also shows up at the very informative About.com Urban Legends site. There are lots of Python…
This is an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions list) for the 2008 United States Presidential Election. I need to disclose up front that I am an Obama supporter. However, with the exception of the very last question, this FAQ is designed as a collection of factual information (such as the latest poll results) and of…
October 1997: It has been six years since I finished Paradigms of AI Programming (or PAIP ), and now seems like a good time to look back at how Lisp and AI programming have changed.
Good morning. Just a second while I get this connection to work. Do I press this button here? Function-F7? No, that's not right. Hmmm. Maybe I'll have to reboot. Hold on a minute. Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I'm your president. While we're waiting, I want to thank Judge David Wills, chairman of the committee…
Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [ title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books…
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. - Mark Twain