The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,391 posts.
Update to post, added 11th September. As expected, there is another side to the story discussed below. See this statement about the decision by the Mathematical Intelligencer and this one about the…
Aditya Bhargava's personal blog.
Epistemic Status: Resident Expert I’m a little late on this, which was an old promise to Robin Hanson (not that he asked for it). I was motivated to deal with this again by the launch of Augu…
Can 2.3728639 be best? Personal site; note puzzles Josh Alman is a graduate student at a technical school in the Boston area. He is working on matrix multiplication, among other problems in complex…
Recently, I’ve been playing Octopath Traveler, and I’m very disappointed with the poor texture filtering seen in this game. It is PS1-level, with severe shimmering artifacts, which ruins the nice pixel art. Tastefully merging retro pixel art with 3D environment is a very cool aesthetic to me, so I want it to look…
A remainder and a modulus look so very similar, but they are not the same thing and worse, are treated differently by different programming languages. Do you know how your language handles mod?
PREFACE. This essay was written in 2009. Since then, a few errata have been corrected and I embedded the youtube videos, but there have been no substantial additions. I think it still holds up fairly well, but if I were to rewrite it today, I would change some things. My main regret is using the criteria of maximum…
Mathematics, applications of mathematics to life in general, and my life as a mathematician.
For the past year, I’ve been working on implementing well known model architectures and building web applications, so I have a fair amount…
The previous post in this series was a quick introduction to the world of SAT and SAT solvers. In this post, we will convert a harder real-world problem, namely _master-key system_, into SAT and explore some of the more advanced techniques used to efficiently convert problems to SAT.
Movement for a single object seems easy. Pathfinding is complex. Why bother with pathfinding? Consider the following situation:
Markov chains, named after Andrey Markov , are mathematical systems that hop from one "state" (a situation or set of values) to another. For example, if you made a Markov chain model of a baby's behavior, you might include "playing," "eating", "sleeping," and "crying" as states, which together with other behaviors…
You can find a PDF version of this blog post here . A weighted graph is a data structure consisting of some vertices and edges, and each...
Disclaimer 2024-12-02 Since this rant is going viral again (again (again)), some disclaimers: I wrote this six years ago to “”“win”“” an ugly Twitter fight. I’m glad I anonymized the inciting tweet and hope I’m the only person still getting grief over this. The core interesting bit— why it’s mathematically valid to…
Visualization of different methods of generating random points inside a sphere
Before I started doing research, I saw SAT solvers as academically interesting but without practical uses ouside of other academic applications. I've since then changed my mind, and I want to change yours, because modern SAT solvers are neat, fast and almost criminally underused by the industry.
Some problems simply have no solution. Some problems have no simple solution. Some problems have many solutions. ...
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Update 2022 : TheIronBorn has found even better permutations using a smarter technique. That thread completely eclipses my efforts in this article.
About six years ago on this blog, I started thinking about trying to make a web-based game based around high-school algebra, and ended up using Scratch to write a short but playable puzzle game in …
Optimizing a breadth-first search of an implicit graph for secondary storage, and memory use in general.
Let’s talk about a small question as a way of introducing a big question. How thick is the atmosphere? How far does Earth’s atmosphere extend into space? In other words, how high can y…
This post is adapted from this research paper that you can read/cite for more info. It analyzes and visualizes 100 cities around the world.
