Last night I discovered another cool mathematical concept akin to the Collatz conjecture - Lychrel numbers. The idea of a lychrel number is pretty straightforward: Take a number, add its reverse, continue until you reach a palindrome number. If you never reach a palindrome, then this is a Lychrel number. Something like this: 349 + 943 = [...]
Minimum substring cover problem
A major part of my thesisinvolves finding an algorithm to discover a good substring cover of text in order to properly syllabify said text. But what is the substring cover problem anyway and what does it entail? The Minimum Substring Cover Problem paper from Hermelin, Rawitz, Rizzi and Vialette dating back to 2007 (judging by [...]
Collatz, Haskell and Memoization
After an awesome longboarding session yesterday afternoon I decided to play around with infinite sequences in Haskell – it’s supposed to be one of the more (most?) powerful features of Haskell – because it’s a lazy language apparently. My first impulse of creating a primes generator was nipped in the bud by a long page [...]
Sabbatical week day 2: I fail at Octave
I’m taking a sabbatical week over the holidays. This week’s posts will serve as a sort of report of what I got up to the previous day instead of the usual schedule – wish me luck that I achieve even half of what I’d like to. After I managed to get the toggl and toshl [...]
Can I please take all my classes online?
As I prepare to study for the subject that has been the bane of my existence for the past two years (by writing this blog post instead) I can’t help but draw a comparison between how classes in my real world university are going and the classes I’m taking as part of Stanford’s online experiment [...]
First steps with Octave and machine learning
You know how most programmers find functional coding to be ever so slightly mind bending and how it’s somewhat difficult to wrap one’s head around working with variables whose state you cannot change and lazy evaluations and all manner of odd things? The thing I’ve had most trouble with and still do actually, is coding [...]
Our intuitive understanding of distance fails us
This is a debate I keep getting into with all sorts of people. No matter how well I try explaining it people simply do not want to believe me they’re thinking about distance all wrong. After last weekend’s trek around a very sunny city where I was forced to keep walking in the blistering noon [...]
I learned two things today 3.9.
Apparently I have neglected to learn anything the past two days. Most likely because I’ve been a bit swamped with a particular probability and statistics theory exam that I started studying for much too late and ended up having only a day and a half time to learn 300 pages of … stuff … by [...]
Implementing a weighed random choice in Clojure
A while ago I wrote about my school project that involves generating pretty trees and concluded the post with the idea that I now have to implement some way for the branch lengths to be a bit random to add more variability. There is an easy and an awesome way to doing this. The [...]
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Checking for primes? Dumber algorithm is faster algorithm
It’s been a busy few weeks since I last posted about my toying around with project euler, but never you mind. I did do some progress nontheless! HA! Just so I won’t bore you with the details, the most interesting thing I discovered is that the way I was calculating prime numbers was totally wrong. [...]
