91–100 of 148 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
is there a print version?
No but I printed this PDF ( http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/everything.... ). 1250 pages. Not sure about the legality of it.
Says on the title page: Creative Commons!
"Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have read the first 50 pages about a 100 times. Does that count? P.S. I have never recommended it to anyone though, I don't recommend books I haven't read all the way through. I will get through TAOCP one day, (it's now on my retirement bucket list, along with learning Sanskrit) but I first need to read through a bunch of Math books forst, so I can get past the 50 page hump.
off the topic, but what made you curious about Sanskrit?
This is mostly all IMO, except where specified otherwise:
- it's an interesting language, because it is the ancestor of many Indian languages (except the languages of the southern Indian states - Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada - and their dialects - and except the languages of the North-Eastern states beyond Assam, maybe - not sure on this one). In fact, even those languages (southern Indian at least) have some Sanskrit-derived words; I think the term is loanwords.
- it's grammar rules are very regular (compared to many other languages, I've heard), which makes it less of a chore and easier to remember and learn;
- (probably many) parts of the language are sort of mathematical / logical in the sense that some of the rules build upon other rules, so you can use your knowledge of the latter to understand the former; e.g. a part of the language called sandhi, which gives the rules for how to combine smaller words/sounds into larger ones. Once you learn those rules (and there are only a handful), a) you can use them both to create new words according to those sandhi rules, by combining existing words (and those new words would be legal Sanskrit, BTW - poets and prose writers did it all the time), and b) can use them to figure out what compound words mean (that you have newly come across), i.e. the reverse process of a). So in that and maybe some other aspects its a bit like a programming language [1], where you build up higher abstractions from lower-level ones. [Edit:] It's my guess that people who like languages like Lisp, Haskell, Clojure, etc. - that are built upon mathematical principles and so on, might find Sanskrit interesting to learn.
- [1] I've also read a few times that due to the mentioned regular qualities of the grammar (and also, I think, due to the unambiguous nature of the sounds in it - each letter or small letter grouping can be (legally) pronounced in only one way), CS and Sanskrit-knowing people have done research on using Sanskrit in computer research in various ways (programming languages (research), AI? No idea about the success or not of those efforts, though.
I take it solutions by students are mostly done in Python now?
I never hear anybody mentioning him but Jeff Erickson's 'Algorithms' textbook [1] has some of the most lucid explanations I've come across. CLRS is often times impenetrable and for the times I didn't like its explanation of something I turned to Jeff Erickson's book and it hasn't failed me yet. I'd urge anybody trying to solidify algorithms and data structures to take a look at it. [1] http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/te…
Thanks for the shout-out! If you can't remember the long URL, http://algorithms.wtf also works. Please send me bug reports!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
off the topic, but what made you curious about Sanskrit?
I'm not the OP, but can comment about Sanskrit a bit. (I had studied Sanskrit in school.) [Edit:] As a third language, apart from English and Hindi. This is mostly all IMO, except where specified otherwise: - it's an interesting language, because it is the ancestor of many Indian languages (except the languages of the southern Indian states - Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada - and their dialects - and except the…
This is a great resource for anybody that isn't formally trained in computer science. A lot of programmers use an abstract data type like a dictionary or hash table, but many of the self-taught and even some formally trained treat it like a magical black box that stores key-value entries very efficiently. What a hash table/dictionary gives it near O(1) properties is a good hashing function for the key, and having a g…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
off the topic, but what made you curious about Sanskrit?
I'm not the OP, but can comment about Sanskrit a bit. (I had studied Sanskrit in school.) [Edit:] As a third language, apart from English and Hindi. This is mostly all IMO, except where specified otherwise: - it's an interesting language, because it is the ancestor of many Indian languages (except the languages of the southern Indian states - Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada - and their dialects - and except the…
erik is the prof.
Erik Demaine is such a great guy, I met him at a conference once, where he gave an invited talk on self-assembling robots. Fascinating stuff, we had a very interesting discussion with him afterwards and his intricate knowledge of even the smallest details was quite impressive. If his talk is anything to go by, this lecture should be very worthwhile.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not the OP, but can comment about Sanskrit a bit. (I had studied Sanskrit in school.) [Edit:] As a third language, apart from English and Hindi. This is mostly all IMO, except where specified otherwise: - it's an interesting language, because it is the ancestor of many Indian languages (except the languages of the southern Indian states - Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada - and their dialects - and except the…
Re: programming languages, it's worth mentioning that a Sanskrit grammarian invented something like context-free grammars around 2500 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_form#Histo...