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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
In every day life we all do our calculations, whether for the taxman, our purchases, paying the household bills or in some academic discipline, using the place value decimal number system. It consi…
I’ve been reading Pearl’s Causal Inference in Statistics , and one of the exercises poses this problem:
A bloom filter is one of those data structures you are probably already aware of, or have at least heard about. For those looking for a simple recap, they are a probabilistic data structure which can …
Curiosity killed the cat I've always been amazed by early game developers. Unlike today, they had to bend and twist software to its extre...
Through a couple of different avenues I wandered, yet again, down a rabbit hole leading to the topic of this post. The first avenue was through my main focus on a particular machine learning topic th
When I found out that the Computer History Museum has a working IBM 1401 computer [1] , I wondered if it could generate the Mandelbrot frac...
When people think of “data science” they probably think of algorithms that scan large datasets to predict a customer’s next move or interpret unstructured te...
I was looking at my Google Calendar tonight and I realized that this software was encouraging a way of thinking about time which has signifi...
Learn how time-weighted averages are calculated and why they’re so powerful for data analysis. Read the full article on the Tiger Data blog.
The subject of game AI generally begins with so-called perfect information games. These are turn-based games where the players have no information hidden from each other and there is no element of chance in the game mechanics (such as by rolling dice or drawing cards from a shuffled deck). Tic Tac Toe, Connect 4…
We recently made a Polylog video about a nonstandard way of understanding the P vs NP problem. As usual, our goal was to present an underrated idea in a broadly understandable way, while being slig…
"Big integers" have landed in Javascript, at least in Firefox and Chrome. One of my favorite things to do with high precision arithmetic is to calculate digits of π. From scratch, that is, using only addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
IBM Slapped the Buzzwords 'AI Interpretability' on Generalized Continued Fractions and their Series Transformations and was awarded a Patent
Draft: v1.1 | Posted: 1/9/2018 | Updated: 1/29/2018 | confidence of success: 85% | estimated time to completion: 1/15/2018 | importance: High
My journey implementing a new dithering algorithm in the Racket programming language.
The following table shows diagrams of identity, the booleans, some standard combinators, some Church numerals, the predecessor function on Church numerals, and Omega. term definition diagram alternative I/1 λx.x K/true λx.λy.x false/0 λx.λy.y S λx.λy.λz.(x z)(y z) Y λf.(λx.x x)(λx.f(x x)) 2 λf.λx.f(f x) 3 λf.λx.f(f(f…
Two of my favorite numbers are pi: $latex \pi = 3.14159… $ and the golden ratio: $latex \displaystyle{ \Phi = \frac{\sqrt{5} + 1}{2} } = 1.6180339… $ They’re related: $latex \pi =…
Searching through millions of points in an instant
You might think it’s unlikely for any interesting mathematics to arise from incense appreciation, but that’s only because you’re unfamiliar with the peculiar character of Muromachi (室町) era Japanese nobles. There has never been a group of people, in any time or place, who were so driven to display their sophistication…
A modest mathematical framing of language
The first thing I wanted to do with my Saab 96 was to establish a baseline weight.
Where did complex numbers come from? You might think that people invented \(i\) just so that they had a solution to the quadratic equat...
Towards an API for the real numbers, Boehm, PLDI’20 Last time out we saw that even in scientific computing applications built by experts, problems with floating point numbers are commonplace. …
An introduction to learned image compression using neural networks.
