I just recently gave a presentation at 38th Southeastern Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory, and Computing all about the computational issues of covering a graph using shortest paths emanating from a particular vertex. It was fun research to do, and the conference was really interesting. I’ve realized that I, like many of my friends, kind of bleed code. You ask us a question and we write programs to answer. This turns out to be useful for CS grad school, but is neither necessary nor sufficient. Instead, I need to bleed research. Expect lots more content to be appearing here shortly as I try and refocus my leisure activities to a combination of coding and writing about it.
This meandering sidelight on code vs research was prompted by my reaction to two presentations – the first was on Super Sudoku Squares and my immediate reaction was to write a program that would count how many super sudoku squares there are of a given size (104*9! for a 9×9 sudoku grid if you care). The second were two presentations from undergrads on using Conway’s game of life on the adjacency matrix of a graph. They had this fantastic idea, but their code was hard to understand or extend or play with. So I immediately banged out a visualization engine for these systems. I’ll link to both of those in a bit, but in this post I just wanted to place my slides online, as the abstract is already available.
