12-minute Mandelbrot: fractals on a 50 year old IBM 1401 mainframe
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...
Introduction to Monte Carlo Tree Search
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…
The Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem
The Profound Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem
Self-flying drone dips, darts and dives through trees at 30 mph
A researcher from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has developed an obstacle-detection system that allows a drone to autonomously dip, dart and dive through a tree-filled field at upwards of 30 miles per hour.
Is REST Best in a Microservices Architecture?
Some thoughts on microservice communication mechanisms
Squeak 5 is out
From: Chris Muller, In the 17 months since Squeak 4.5 was released, a huge development effort took place to create the next generation virtual-machine for the Squeak / Pharo / Newspeak family of pr…
Lucene: The Good Parts
Before MongoDB, before Cassandra, before “NoSQL”, there was Lucene. Did you know that Doug Cutting wrote the first versions of …
Learn to Code, It's Harder Than You Think
TL;DR: All the evidence shows that programming requires a high level of aptitude that only a small percentage of the population possess. The...
The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
Initial cover design. Nobody asked me about the writing of Effective Modern C++ (EMC++), but I wanted to talk about it a little, so ...
Mono 4.0.0 Release Notes
Mono has historically chosen to use the highest possible precision for all floating point operations. This means that both 64-bit math and 32-bit math were done with the highest precision available.
Secure yourself, Part 1: Air-gapped computer, GPG and smartcards
This blog entry is part of a series covering: Logging into your laptop and decrypting it automatically Encrypting and decrypting any passwords or secure info you have Sending and receiving encrypted mails Providing 2-step authentication codes for your web logins Doing all of the above on your mobile phone…
A Complete Guide to Rails Caching
Caching in a Rails app is a little bit like that one friend you sometimes have around for dinner, but should really have around more often.