The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
The programming profession is blessed with a number of gifted essayists. Today I will pick on three of my favorites — Eric Raymond, Paul Graham, and Steve Yegge — because they all seem to disagree about why (and whether) mathematics is relevant to the practicing programmer. Their attitudes might be summarized as:
This weekend I decided to play around a bit with genetic programming and put evolution to the test, the test of fine art 🙂
Presentation-quality math with Three.js and WebGL.
Whenever people start talking about NP-Complete problems, or even NP problems, one of the first examples they reach for is the classic Traveling Salesperson Problem. TSP makes sense because it int...
You may feel like you've seen this before. If you have, skip to the end where I talk about a formula, and discuss the relevance to parameters in computer hashing algorithms. In particular, I'm going to talk about how large hash spaces should be to avoid collisions with a given level of probability. If there are just…
Mathematics, applications of mathematics to life in general, and my life as a mathematician.
The MIT Challenge My friend Scott Young recently finished an astounding feat: he completed all 33 courses in MIT’s fabled computer science curriculum, from Linear ... Read more
Experimenting with the "divisibility" of complex numbers, I stumbled across this thingy. It looks like a fractal. Although the formula does not do any iterations. It reminds me of something. But I dont know what. Doing a Google image search brings up a couple of galaxies :) This image shows the region from (-1/-1) to…
The following is a "photographic" gallery of fractal patterns found while exploring the planet with Google Earth. Each is provided with a KMZ file so the reader can explore the region for themselves. Readers are encouraged to submit their own discoveries for inclusion, credits will be included. Besides being examples…
Conway's Game of Life, emulated in Conway's Game of Life: The life simulator used is Golly which has a built-in script to generate these metapixel grids (select a pattern, and choose "metafier.py" from the scripts list). Outer Totalistic Cellular Automata Meta-Pixel: The metacell uses a period 184 tractor beam, which…
A continuous version of Conway's Life, using floating point values instead of integers: supports many interesting phenomena such as gliders that can travel in any direction, rotating pairs of gliders, wickstretchers and the appearance of elastic tension in the 'cords' that join the blobs. Slides showing how the rule…
A new information-theoretical model of human sensory perception and memory sheds light on some peculiarities of the nervous system.
If you would like me to grade your answers, please send an email to cperciva-exam-part1@tarsnap.com [EDIT: I have now finished marking part 1 answers; please do not send me any more] with your answers to the above questions along with the following two:
Meta Title: Math, Sports Data & IPTV: A Portugal Guide Meta Description: Explore how math-minded sports fans use IPTV in Portugal to watch live football, Champi
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The halting problem asks whether the execution of a specific program for a given input will terminate.
A hash table is data structure that is used to search for exact matches to a search key. For searching, they work like this: Take a search key (example: the word “cat”) Hash the search …
Investigation to find a better rational approximation for pi. Can we get out more digits than we put in? Chance to win a prize if you can do bette
A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a booksprint. The event s...
In 2007, I met Philip Wadler at a conference, who mentioned to me that he wanted to teach lambda calculus to his eight-year-old children.
Random numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system. Which is why you should worry…
