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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
We published our video on zero-knowledge proofs! Surprisingly, making this video took a lot of work. Zero-knowledge proofs for coloring are one of those algorithms that, in hindsight, seem beautifu…
There's a great deal said about Ada, Countess of Lovelace that I find misguided. And, worse, the real intellectual triumph of Lovelace is ...
[Updated on 2020-09-03: Updated the algorithm of SARSA and Q-learning so that the difference is more pronounced. [Updated on 2021-09-19: Thanks to 爱吃猫的鱼, we have this post in Chinese].
Collaboratively editing strings of text is a common desire in peer-to-peer applications. For example, a note-taking app might represent each document as a single collaboratively-edited string of text.
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Center for Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton This page at http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies Prepared to accompany cityLIVE! "everything einstein" November 15, 2007, 6:30 pm The New Hazlett Theater…
If you’re looking for a nice dose of crypto conspiracy theorizing and want to read a paper by some very knowledgeable cryptographers, I have just the paper for you. Titled “A Riddle Wrapped in an E…
Ever wondered how the ^.?$|^(..+?)\1+$ regular expression can tell you if a number is not prime? In this blog post you'll learn how and why it works. Code examples in Java, JavaScript, Python and Perl are provided.
How many board configurations are there in the game of 2048? Let's estimate using combinatorics.
This blog post is about an interesting detail about machine learning that I came across as a researcher at Jane Street - that of the interaction between L2 r...
Tutorials and articles of Inigo Quilez on computer graphics, fractals, math, art, demoscene, shaders and more.
[This is a guest post by Silvia De Toffoli and Eamon Duede. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Silvia De Toffoli (University School …
OK, since no one is posting, you get to endure another Monopoly post! After our recent attempt to play the shortest actual game of Monopoly on record, we started to wonder about what the shortest T…
A voting system that sidesteps Arrow's theorem entirely. The scare quotes around
I have a simple fast Fourier transform implementation on the page Free small FFT in multiple languages , whose asymptotic time complexity is the optimal Θ( n log n ). I wanted to know how much additional speed-up could be obtained by reorganizing memory access patterns and using SIMD vector arithmetic instructions…
I know that floating-point arithmetic is a bit crazy on modern computers. For example, floating-point numbers are not associative: 0.1+(0.2+0.3) == 0.599999999999999978 (0.1+0.2)+0.3 == 0.600000000000000089 But, at least, this is fairly consistent in my experience. You should simply not assume fancy properties like…
Fast Fibonacci Computations With a Linear Algebra Twist
Hugo Hadfield - Cross stack robotics engineer and computer vision researcher specializing in deep learning, sensor fusion, geometric algebra and applications in self-driving cars and robotic manipulation.
I built an interactive Shiny application that uses simulated annealing to solve the famous traveling salesman problem. You can play around with it to create and solve your own tours at the bottom of …
This week we (me & Anton Kovsharov) published Paperproof, a Gentzen-tree-like proof interface for Lean 4. In this post I'll review proof visualisations from o...
EDIT: I never expected this post to garner so much interest. Just to be clear, using the constant is a very bad idea in almost every situation I can think of. Even instructions like RCPSS should only be used by people who are convinced that the tradeoffs are worth it (or don’t have any other choice). Subtracting from…
When developing software to run in a Unix environment, you will often be able to use the same system features and benefit from good developer tools, regardless of the particular platform you're working on, as most processors will provide a rich instruction set and virtual memory, among other things.
SAT is often described as the "mother of all NP-complete problems." This post goes over what SAT is and why it is considered to be so important. A simple SAT solver is implemented using Python in the process.
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.
Presently into the 100th year of his life of vast experience, living in his Buffalo residence, here is a video message communicated by his daughter when he turned 99, at the beginning of a year-long celebration, with conferences in his honour at various places.
Beneath the utilitarian purpose of computation, computing is also a source of delight and wonder . Software is not just databases and mail merges or SaaS and spreadsheets; it's creative coding and simulated cities , code poetry and bulletin board systems . It's websites that dazzle and iPhone apps that make the heart…
The missing chapter of Hacker's Delight
As you all may know, I watched and posted my lecture notes of the whole MIT Introduction to Algorithms course. In this post I want to summarize all the topics that were covered in the lectures and point out some of the most interesting things in them. Actually, before I wrote this article, I had started writing an...
Riffling from factory order to complete randomness.
