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Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?
wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at Philosophy.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,393 posts.
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A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
(A play in 4 acts. Please feel free to exit along with the stage character that best represents you. Take intermissions as you see fit. Click on the stage if...
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Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity
Update (August 11, 2011): Thanks to everyone who offered useful feedback! I uploaded a slightly-revised version, adding a “note of humility” to the introduction, correcting the footnot…
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Low-level x86 code compression for 64k intros
This is about the “secret ingredient” in my EXE packer kkrunchy, which was used in our (Farbrausch) 64k intros starting from “fr-030: Candytron”, and also in a lot of other …
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Hotelling’s Game, or Why Gas Stations Have Competitors Nearby
There are hundreds of gas stations around San Francisco in the California Bay area. One might think that gas stations would spread out to serve local neighborhoods. But this idea is contradicted by a common observation. Whenever you visit a gas station, there is almost always another in the vicinity, often just across…
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Ten Ways to Check if an Integer Is a Power Of Two in C
To write a program to check if an integer is a power of two, you could follow two basic strategies: check the number based on its decimal value, or check it based on its binary representation. The former approach is more human-friendly but generally less efficient; the latter approach is more machine-friendly but…
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Donut math - How donut.c works
There has been a sudden resurgence of interest in my "donut" code from 2006 , and I've had a couple requests to explain this one. It's been five years now, so it's not exactly fresh in my memory, so I will reconstruct it from scratch, in great detail, and hopefully get approximately the same result.
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Complex numbers have never been so intuitive to me
Imaginary numbers always confused me. Like understanding e, most explanations fell into one of two categories: Gee, what a great way to encourage math in…
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Fantastic summary of some of the math pertinent to theoretical computer science.
This web page is a revised and extended version of Appendix A from the book Conceptual Structures by John F. Sowa. It presents a brief summary of the following topics for students and general readers of that book and related books such as Knowledge Representation and books on logic, linguistics, and computer science.
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Gray code at the pediatrician's office
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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"The worst algorithm in the world?"
You know the Fibonacci numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, … Each number is the sum of the previous two. Let’s say the zeroth Fibonacci number is zero, so: $latex \begin{array}{r@{\…
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Kill Math
The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
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Smaller than Bloom filters
I've been looking at what would be needed in order to have a global view of CRLs in browsers. At the moment revocation has three problems: privacy (by asking the CA about the status of a certificate you're revealing to them what you're looking at), performance (OCSP checks take hundreds of milliseconds which adds up…
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Patent 5,893,120 reduced to mathematical formulae
I have previously argued that the Bilski ruling renders all software unpatentable in the US because any method of manipulating information ...
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A “perfect” voting system
A voting system that sidesteps Arrow's theorem entirely. The scare quotes around
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The Prime That Wasn’t
Life, technology, and other good things
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Succinct Data Structures: Cramming 80,000 words into a Javascript file
<img src="http://zwibbler.com/shared/1024.png"/> jQuery creator John Resig needs a little help storing lists of words in his side project. Let's go overkill and explore a little known branch of computer science called Succinct Data Structures.
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Skip Lists are Fascinating
Skip lists are a fascinating data structure: very simple, and yet have the same asymptotic efficiency as much more complicated AVL trees and red-black trees.
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Why Data Structures Matter: left, right folds, btrees
Our experience on Day 0 of JPR11 yielded a nice example of the need to choose an appropriate implementation of an abstract concept. As I mentioned in the previous post, we experimented with Michael…
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Visualizing dynamic programming
I’ve always thought dynamic programming was a pretty crummy name for the practice of storing sub-calculations to be used later. Why not call it table-filling algorithms , because indeed, thinking of a dynamic programming algorithm as one that fills in a table is a quite good way of thinking about it.
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New string search algorithm
ULTRARUBY JEWELRY menghadirkan pilihan perhiasan berlian yang elegan untuk melengkapi gaya dan momen istimewa Anda.
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Maze-generation algorithms, with JS demos
Algorithms, circle mazes, hex grids, masking, weaving, braiding, 3D and 4D grids, spheres, and more!
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Java Hangs When Converting 2.2250738585072012e-308
Konstantin Preißer made an interesting discovery , after reading my article “ PHP Hangs On Numeric Value 2.2250738585072011e-308 ”: Java — both its runtime and compiler — go into an infinite loop when converting the decimal number 2.2250738585072012e-308 to double-precision binary floating-point. This number is…
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Maze Generation: Wilson's algorithm
Algorithms, circle mazes, hex grids, masking, weaving, braiding, 3D and 4D grids, spheres, and more!