On January 18, 2012 a number of websites “went dark” to protest the United States House of Representatives Stop Online Piracy Act and Senate Protect IP Act, more commonly known as SOPA and PIPA. Like many things, there are many way to go about “blacking out” one’s website. Wikipedia used JavaScript and CSS to overlay [...]
Towards the end of last year I signed up for the “basic” track of the Stanford Engineering Introduction To Artificial Intelligence class, mainly out of curiosity, but also because the instructors (Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig) and I share the same employer. I intended to follow along at a leisurely pace, unsure if I would [...]
Every now and then it’s useful to challenge oneself, to grow, to stretch. A couple of months ago, a friend of mine noticed a McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Arby’s within spitting distance of each other, a trifecta of sorts. Then came the eureka moment, where he envisioned combining a Big Mac, Double Down and [...]
A some point last year I became infatuated with a game commonly known as Flood-It by a company called LabPixies. My obsession resulted in the creation of a clone I call C O L O R F L O W which addresses the major faults I found with the game, namely there was no way [...]
Problem #18, find the greatest sum of numbers along a path in a triangle of numbers, looks like a standard tree search problem. However, there’s a note at the bottom stating a brute force method won’t work for a harder/bigger version in problem #67. So I decided to skip the exercise of writing the tree [...]
Perhaps this has been going on forever and I’ve only been attuned to it for the last few years. When a high profile public change occurs e.g. new President of the United States takes office, the media likes to make a big deal about what happens during the first 100 days. While it certainly is [...]
About a month ago, I came across a post from Jon McLoone on the Wolfram Blog where he detailed his method for finding the 25 best Hangman words. His metric was the percentage of games his computer algorithm would fail to guess a given word. His results make sense; short words with low frequency characters [...]
Last month I went on a few training hikes for an upcoming backpacking trip, and on the final two, I took along my GPS. Google Earth provides a wealth of options for visualizing GPS data, but I wanted to get a better understanding of what was going on under the hood. So I exported my [...]
Problem #15 Starting in the top left corner in a 20 by 20 grid, how many routes are there to the bottom right corner? I often used this question during interviews and suprisingly, very few candidates were able to make much progress with it. I wasn’t looking for a candidate to code it 100% correctly [...]
Problem #12 Find the first triangle number to have over 500 divisors. As I’m progressing through these problems, certain types/sequences of numbers keep popping up. I’ve started a library of functions called eulerLib.py. The first thing I did was add a triangle number generator to my library: def triangleNumber(): num = 1 add = 2 [...]
