Viewing profile — questerzen

The given best-game solution is not optimal: Black can delay mate for another move to give a forced win in 11 ply rather than in 9 ply. Optimal is: N4 n5 N6+ k7 R4 as given, but Bl…

Here is an example of a case that backtracking is required where there is only one solution: 11110 ----- 11|....0 2|....0 0|00000 0|00000 0|00000 The sequential constraint solver f…

I realised the backtracker can stop early as soon as all squares are filled in (doh!). As a result the timings have changed dramatically. Database generation: 25s; Sequential solve…

My sequential constraint solver (no backtracking) also found 24,976,511 games it could solve without backtracking or using more than one constraint at a time. To get an idea of the…

I calculated that 25,309,575 games have a unique solution. My back-tracking solver correctly finds all answers for all of the 28,781,820 possible distinct games.

My experience with Packt has been wholly negative. To give an example of what to expect, my experience with one particular book on Scientific Python: * most code examples wouldn't …

Funny, I just reread "What do you care what other people think?" yesterday. The parallel of NASA's design process for avionics software to TDD is both striking and revealing. Peopl…

Other people have also suggested Latin as the most likely base language. A better discussion is provided here: http://www.science20.com/patrick_lockerby/patterns_of_latin_...

Growing up around the tech industry in the 1980s, I found the casual racism and sexism of computer engineers difficult to deal with. The behaviour was "excused" by its being an exc…

The Black Swan has a good point to make about reliance on over-simplified mathematical models, but Taleb's macho anti-intellectualism is ultimately nihilistic since he denies even …

I use Python a great deal, especially for tooling and prototyping and appreciate the fact that programming is fast, easy and focused on the inherent complexity of the problem. Simi…

So I hate C++. What I really want is the speed, flexibility, universality and simplicity of C. But I wish structs had destructors, and a way to bind namespaced related functions. O…

I'm constantly surprised by how often I still need to look up file formats, and having a resource like this is a great starting point. Some examples from my recent experience for w…

It is probably a sign of a good language that the words used most should be similar in frequency to their use in pseudo code. When words like "end" (Ruby), "self" (Python), "import…

I added division and brackets. This gets every number up to 5397, with only about 400 numbers still missing overall ( Potentiation is a problem though (particularly when combined w…

From the Wikipedia page on the JVM: "[code verification]...allowing the JIT compiler to transform stack accesses into fixed register accesses. Because of this, that the JVM is a st…

I imagine you are right. But there should be plenty of scope for optimising this in the VM itself. Most stack operations are immediately preceded by a push, so hold the top of the …

"The best camera is the one you have with you" is a good adage. For prototyping a language needs to feel effortless so you can deal with the essential complexity of the problem and…

Roger Penrose's Road to Reality makes use of Clifford Algebra and Grassmann Products, so at least some serious physicists are using it seriously. Even though I had come across it b…

You can tell a lot about a person from his bookshelves and I know this is a guy after my own heart. He has almost every non-fiction book on my Goodreads list: Books Scientists Shou…

PG does appear to want to do a better job than the rest of his industry and he should be applauded for that. But there is very little evidence that PE or VC funding adds much value…