abecedarius

1651 ms·

3751.
by abecedarius 18y ago
From the article: "Lenat did not give Eurisko any advice or steer the program in any particular strategic direction." I think this is misleading given other sources, e.g. "In the morning Lenat would cull the designs and help it along. He cr
3752.
by abecedarius 18y ago
I'd like to learn from some good, concrete, and practical cheatsheets; this one mostly enumerates what you'd already remember with no trouble. For example, a computing one for people who don't know computers might go: It's possible and valu
3753.
by abecedarius 18y ago
I don't know Mathematica either, but here's a Markov-model hack as barrkel suggested: http://github.com/darius/languagetoys/blob/505309d5900ac49c6...
3754.
by abecedarius 18y ago
The big new idea that's said to be uncharted territory reminds me of research from the 90s, actually: "We also exploit the tight integration between versioning and incremental analysis to provide a novel history-sensitive approach to error
3755.
by abecedarius 18y ago
IIRC according to Feynman's memoirs the O-rings were the leading candidate already in his first meeting with NASA engineers, and in his first days in DC General Kutyna made the link to cold-weather brittleness. It did not take them months t
3756.
by abecedarius 18y ago
I've written C code emitters too. FWIW, I've found nicely-indented output templates help to keep the source code of the emitter clear (and with no need to get at the enclosing scopes). But the question you raised was whether indentation-onl
3757.
by abecedarius 18y ago
You don't have to know the level of nesting; you can add indents afterward just as easily as you can wrap a subexpression in parentheses afterward. def indent(code): return code.replace('\n', '\n ')
3758.
by abecedarius 18y ago
I didn't miss tail-call optimization much when I studied SICP using XLisp back in the 80s (with 640kb of memory) -- only a couple exercises blew the stack and made me add a while loop. Of course it matters more for real programming on real
3759.
by abecedarius 18y ago
Nice idea. I decided I'd rather see it laid out in columns like 'ls' does, and with the attribute names unchanged. Here's the result: http://github.com/darius/columnize/blob/69d2b1c084ab3fc7c72d...
3760.
by abecedarius 18y ago
Let's try to compare the length of the sentence to the excess prison-days he sentenced people to. The story says there were 5,000 detainees, that his sentencing rate was 2.5 times the norm, and the two particular cases described were for 3
3761.
by abecedarius 18y ago
For this to be in a library, I'd want it parameterized by the random number generator. (After being convinced it's really worth it.)
3762.
by abecedarius 18y ago
Here's a Brian Hayes column on good algorithms for this problem: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.3822,y.0,no.,cont... I think lacker was probably thinking of a correct algorithm for finding the n largest values in a set, instea
3763.
by abecedarius 18y ago
There's been research on this, e.g. http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~jeffery/alamo/ That's about 10 years old, though, and I don't know what's been done since.
3764.
by abecedarius 18y ago
The "set stack" and map ideas down at the bottom suggest a variant since I was just reading about A* search: a "set priority queue" that keeps the Ullman map's parallel members and values arrays in heap order according to the values. I'm th
3765.
by abecedarius 18y ago
No, it's correct -- you can see that by induction on the add operation. If you're allowed to increase n without first ensuring the invariant on the first n members, then it can break, yes.
3766.
by abecedarius 18y ago
I wrote this article; while I don't mind the reposting (its original host is gone), they might have kept my name on it. Here's a repost on my own site: http://wry.me/misc/peval.html
3767.
by abecedarius 18y ago
The signup page offers to use OpenID, apparently in place of giving you an email address; then when I get back it still requires my email. It's not clear why I should have bothered to sign in with OpenID then.
3768.
by abecedarius 18y ago
You make objects out of a directed graph of simpler objects, recursively. To answer a message they can ask their acquaintances for help, make new objects, or change their state. To an object, all that matters about other objects is how they
3769.
by abecedarius 18y ago
If it has to be a touchscreen, then start with http://pvote.org/ . It's orders of magnitude simpler than the commercial voting machines.
3770.
by abecedarius 18y ago
I do reviews for a client and might be interested in taking on another. You can see my contact info and some of my code at http://github.com/darius .