51–60 of 133 posts
Any article like this for grammar correction? I've been interested to know why grammar checking and corrections can't be more accurate.
What Norvig is doing is what we should be teaching. He is tackling this seemingly REALLY hard problem by thinking about it methodically, translating some intuition into code, carefully constructing an argument about how to solve it, and ways that it could be extended. This is what actual engineers look like.
Everything I've seen around "coding" though has become a masochistic exercise in teaching kids random syntax details and then calling them Coders and Geniuses and Computer Scientists when they successfully copy what the teacher showed them.
When you read Norvig's code (big fan of his Sudoku one as well), you realize how the actual "code" is secondary in the sense that what it is really doing is expressing an idea. A very nunanced, elegant idea, but ultimately the product of doing some hard thinking and exploration on a problem domain.
If we taught kids to just think about problems in this way, ohh what a world it would be!
Reverse of the logic presented could be used to inject typos into a document per distributed copy of it to help identify anyone sharing documents online; basically each copy is unique to allow for attribution. Hash of each document could even be given to a third party and archived to provide if needed independent verification of the claim that the document and the document itself could be encrypted, loaded to another…
What is the application where typos in a document are acceptable?
I couldn't help but read this and think about all the "coding" initiatives I've seen in K-12 and shake my head. What Norvig is doing is what we should be teaching. He is tackling this seemingly REALLY hard problem by thinking about it methodically, translating some intuition into code, carefully constructing an argument about how to solve it, and ways that it could be extended. This is what actual engineers look like…
I wish I could say that in my time of teaching, I've met people who could just get these things without actually writing code. But I think for most non-geniuses, including myself, it's all too abstract until you know how to concretely write code yourself.
Any article like this for grammar correction? I've been interested to know why grammar checking and corrections can't be more accurate.
I couldn't help but read this and think about all the "coding" initiatives I've seen in K-12 and shake my head. What Norvig is doing is what we should be teaching. He is tackling this seemingly REALLY hard problem by thinking about it methodically, translating some intuition into code, carefully constructing an argument about how to solve it, and ways that it could be extended. This is what actual engineers look like…
Is there any C++ version of a decent spell checker ? Been looking for sometime (mainly out of curiosity), most are either amateur school projects or too academic/phd-ish....would love to go through a good open source C++ based spell checker that can be used in practise (with little modifications if required)
I couldn't help but read this and think about all the "coding" initiatives I've seen in K-12 and shake my head. What Norvig is doing is what we should be teaching. He is tackling this seemingly REALLY hard problem by thinking about it methodically, translating some intuition into code, carefully constructing an argument about how to solve it, and ways that it could be extended. This is what actual engineers look like…
def pdist(counter):
"Make a probability distribution, given evidence from a Counter."
N = sum(counter.values())
return lambda x: counter[x]/N
P = pdist(COUNTS)
I couldn't help but read this and think about all the "coding" initiatives I've seen in K-12 and shake my head. What Norvig is doing is what we should be teaching. He is tackling this seemingly REALLY hard problem by thinking about it methodically, translating some intuition into code, carefully constructing an argument about how to solve it, and ways that it could be extended. This is what actual engineers look like…
I agree that what Norvig demonstrates here and in all of his notebooks is an ideal of how we use programming to explore (nevermind implement ) concepts. But how do we get there without teaching people how to program, including syntax? I think everyone agrees that kids should be able to understand the themes of "A Modest Proposal" and perhaps even write with such depth, but they have to learn their ABCs and be compell…
I'll give you a perfect example. I was asked to evaluate this Scratch course for middle schoolers just as they were about to present their final projects. One of the kids did a basic pong-like game with human-controlled characters. The ball would move all over the place, seemingly randomly. The game didn't seem to make any sense to the kids who played it. But, the administration felt that this was an incredible success.
I later learned that he had produced the game by mostly following along a step-by-step tutorial introduced in class. And I also learned that the reason the ball moved erratically was that the kid had absolutely no concept of how to deal with the angles, much less identify what portion of the character the ball had struck!
To me, THAT would have been the real learning! What an opportunity to have taken that kid outside and kick a soccer ball (this was in Brazil) outside and explore some intuition about how it rebounded on the wall; what a chance to see if he could not come up with a way to grok a solution to figuring out to detect where in the character the ball had hit since this didn't come out-of-the-box in Scratch.
In other words, I don't mind that they learn the syntax. But there's a reason why firms outsource a lot of "coding" to South Asian countries for pennies on the dollar. Knowing the syntax is cheap. Stimulating kids to think about problems, developing a routine and passion about solving them, that's where the real pot of gold is.