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Physical Intuition, Not Mathematics (2011)
“What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”
Topics /
Math & Algorithms
The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 106 posts.
92
The Simulated Annealing Algorithm
Simulated annealing is a method for finding a good (not necessarily perfect) solution to an optimization problem. If you're in a situation where you want to maximize or minimize something, your problem can likely be tackled with simulated annealing.
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Why telephone keypads are arranged the way they are
Why are the push buttons on a telephone arranged the way they are?
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Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout for Swype
An overview of my work on optimizing phone keyboard layouts for Swype and T9. There's some interesting history here as well as a novel simulation-based approach to keyboard optimization.
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Brainfuck Optimization Strategies
In almost every computation a great variety of arrangements for the succession of the processes is possible, and various considerations must influence the selection amongst them for the purposes of a Calculating Engine. One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time…
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Maze Generation in Thirteen Bytes (2012)
Update 12/7/2012 @ 13:46: Peter Ferrie smashed my record by a single byte, so the record is now held by him at 12 bytes. Congrats, and I feel like a fool for missing it :-) I’ve tacked on h…
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Calculating the intersection area of 3 or more circles
While attempting to learn Javascript and D3.js a couple months ago, I wrote a little library for displaying area proportional venn diagrams .
101
Implementing Levenshtein Automata
Thanks to Ken Hironaka for kindly taking a lot of time to read and fix countless errors in this blog post!
102
Energy Is Not Conserved (2010)
I’ve been meaning to link to this post at the arXiv blog , which is a great source of quirky and interesting new papers. In this case they are pointing to a speculative but interesting paper by Martin Perl and Holger Mueller, which suggests an experimental search for gradients in dark energy by way of atom…
103
Discrete Analysis – A new type of math journal
This post is to announce the start of a new mathematics journal, to be called Discrete Analysis. While in most respects it will be just like any other journal, it will be unusual in one important w…
104
Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? (2003)
The original paper that introduced the simulation argument
105
Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science
Attention conservation notice : Once, I was one of the authors of a paper on cellular automata . Lawyers for Wolfram Research Inc. threatened to sue me, my co-authors and our employer, because one of our citations referred to a certain mathematical proof, and they claimed the existence of this proof was a trade secret…
106
From 1,000,000 to Graham's Number
Graham's number is so big, we need a whole new set of tools to even discuss it.