Hello Hacker News and Reddit! Holy crap there are a lot of you… There are two approaches to teaching a class entitled “Algorithms”. One is to teach a survey course where you are told about a bunch of algorithms and how they work. Tests in such a class could be passed with brute force memorization [...]
Archives for December 2009
Code fast
Students simply cannot code fast enough to express themselves. When confronted with a problem, particularly a small algorithms problem, my first instinct is to write a little snippet of code for every solution I dream up. I can do this, because I write code very quickly. My students can’t. They simply do not have the [...]
iPhone not the problem. AT&T is the problem. (probably)
A week or so ago there was an article in the New York times asserting that the reason the iPhone kinda’ sucks when used in large cities (New York and San Francisco especially) was that the iPhone’s antennae were poorly designed. This was kind of a publicity coup for AT&T who are generally viewed as [...]
Causation is not (necessarily) Correlation
Correlation has a dictionary meaning (two things are related to one another) and a math meaning (having to do with a mathematical relationship between two variable being well-approximated by a line). It is important to note that two variables may be perfectly correlated in the dictionary sense, but be mathematically completely uncorrelated. Consider . There [...]
The 24 Puzzle
The 24 puzzle asks “Given the numbers A, B, C, and D, is there a way to combine the numbers using arithmetical operations +,-,*, and / so that the whole equation evaluates to 24?” I got curious about what inputs to the 24 puzzle had a solution and what ones did not. So I wrote [...]
