Tag: algorithms
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So, dear reader, I wrote a Gauss-Jordan solver
Been a while… …Anyway: I am now designing (PhD related) a simulation of a NoC system and I need to have it run some code – so I thought I’d look at code to solve a system of linear equations and sought to build the same using Gauss-Jordan elimination. It proved to be a lot…
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Not even on Wikipedia…
If you are old enough, like me, to remember the Cold War before the days of glasnost and perestroika, you will also recall that one of the strategic weaknesses of the Soviet Union was that it was forced to steal and copy advanced western technologies, seemingly unable to invent them itself. In many cases that…
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In continued praise of “Programming Pearls”
I have read two books in the last year that have fundamentally changed the way I think about computers and programming – The Annotated Turing and Programming Pearls. Programming Pearls in particular continues to inspire me in the way it makes you think about building better algorithms and using data structures better – and here’s…
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“Basically, you would be able to compute anything you wanted”
The quote that forms the title here comes from Lance Fortnow, a computer scientist at Northwestern University, in an article (here – subscription required) in the current edition of the New Scientist on the question. It’s an odd statement for a computer scientist to make – most numbers are transcendental numbers and so are fundamentally incomputable:…
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The opposite of science, but could be fun
I have created a prediction market on Vladimir Romanov’s P=NP proposal. Starting price for it being proved correct by the end of 2011 is very low – or the odds are long, depending on how you look at it (10 cents wins $99.90 ie 999/1). Have a bet – it’s free and it’s fun. It is here.
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Possibly the most important news you will read this year
Apparently P==NP. (So public key encryption – used for internet commerce – is broken and many more problems than we previously thought are quickly solvable). At least that is the suggestion you can read here. Slashdot also has this here. If it’s true then the revolution has just begun. If it’s false, well, tomorrow’s another…
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What if P = NP?
Update (5 March): read a better version here. I admit I now going slightly out of my depth, but I will try to explain what this is about and why it is interesting. It is known that computers can solve some problems in what is called “polynomial time“: that is to say a finite time…
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530 lines of Javascript
I have just written that amount of code in what I persist in thinking of as a toy language (it was actually somewhat longer until I refactored the code to group some common functions together), I had to do this for a coursework exercise – a lot of effort to be honest for what is…
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Algorithms matter … a lot
One of the things that most annoyed me about the article on graphics was the author’s subsequent attempts (once he came under criticism) to justify bad technological advice through the excuse that falling hardware prices meant that his advice to use inappropriately optimised formats did not matter. For the truth is that cheaper hardware expands…
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Some advice you should ignore
I have an interest in graphic formats – I wrote the perl package Image::Pngslimmer a while back when I was hacking some perl database code that delivered (via Ajax) graphs and photographs. I built the whole website for fun and learning purposes and so therefore used PNG graphics when JPEGs would have (for the photographs at least) been more…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 