Fabulous adventures in coding

Code for this episode can be found here. I have not updated the Life algorithm, but I have added a new feature to the client, namely, you can now resize the form and the display box will resize along with … Continue reading →

Code for this episode can be found here. All right, let’s get into it. Since I want this series to concentrate on the algorithms and not the user interface, what I will probably do is make incremental improvements to the … Continue reading →

Code for this episode can be found here. There are literally fifty years of articles explaining Conway’s Game of Life, starting with the one that introduced it to me: the October 1970 issue of Scientific American. Seems like a great … Continue reading →

Welcome to yet another working-from-home pandemic episode of Fun For Friday Fabulous Adventures. Over the past while I’ve gradually been looking for music, movies and games I enjoyed as a teenager and seeing how they hold up. So I am … Continue reading →

A student who I used to tutor in CS occasionally sent me a meme yesterday which showed “NEW GRAD vs SENIOR DEVELOPER”; the new grad is all caps yelling NO! YOU CAN’T JUST USE BRUTE FORCE HERE! WE NEED TO … Continue reading →

I don’t enjoy politics, I don’t know enough about it, and my privilege greatly insulates me from its negative effects, and so I don’t talk about it much on this blog. My intention in creating the blog lo these decades … Continue reading →

Good Friday afternoon all and welcome to this working-from-home-and-obsessively-washing-hands edition of FAIC. I am posting today from my recently-transformed spare room which is now apparently my office. Scott Hanselman started a great twitter thread of techies showing off their home … Continue reading →

Here’s an interesting question I saw on StackOverflow recently; it was interesting because the answer seems obvious at first, but making a small change to the question makes the answer very different. The original question was: suppose we have an … Continue reading →

My manager and I got off on a tangent in our most recent one-on-one on the subject of the durability of design mistakes in programming languages. A particular favourite of mine is the worst of the operator precedence problems of … Continue reading →

Well this is a first. Twitter user Plazmaz brought a scam github repository and web site to my attention; see his thread on Twitter for details. It’s a pretty obviously fake site, and there is some evidence in the metadata … Continue reading →

While watching the first episode of the new Star Trek series just now I noticed a nice little Easter egg: Admiral Picard (retired) apparently has the same 1982 science fiction book club edition of The Complete Robot handy on his … Continue reading →

One last post for this decade. There has been some discussion on tech twitter lately on the subject of whether it is possible to be “successful” in the programming business without working long hours. I won’t dignify the posts which … Continue reading →

You might recall that before my immensely long series on ways we could make C# a probabilistic programming language, I did a short series on how we can automatically computed the exact derivative in any direction of a real-valued function … Continue reading →

My friend Larry from the previous episode mentioned to me that a group of several male and female belted kingfishers had been spotted at the river; I’d never seen kingfishers at our little river before and I wanted to get … Continue reading →

I enjoy photographing dragonflies and damselflies; this year I got some pretty reasonable shots of common blue damselflies, white-faced meadowhawks, a twelve-spotted skimmer, and my favourite, ebony jewelwings. It can be hard to get these little guys in focus, but … Continue reading →

Today, I have a Mystery Of The Unknown for you to solve. Unlike most of the puzzlers on this blog, I don’t know the answer. UPDATE: Mystery solved! See below. On August 4th at about 20 minutes past 10 PM … Continue reading →

I’m back from my annual vacation where I fly south to Canada and take way too many photos. As with all my hobbies, I’m not a very good nature photographer but I do enjoy it, and this year was particularly … Continue reading →

Last time on FAIC we were attacking our final problem in computing the expected value of a function f applied to a set of samples from a distribution p. We discovered that we could sometimes do a “stretch and shift” of … Continue reading →

Last time on FAIC we finally wrote a tiny handful of lines of code to correctly implement importance sampling; if we have a distribution p that we’re sampling from, and a function f that we’re running those samples through, we can compute … Continue reading →

Last time on FAIC we implemented a better technique for estimating the expected value of a function f applied to samples from a distribution p: Compute the total area (including negative areas) under the function x => f(x) * p.Weight(x) … Continue reading →

Last time on FAIC I showed why our naïve implementation of computing the expected value can be fatally flawed: there could be a “black swan” region where the “profit” function f is different enough to make a big difference in … Continue reading →

I’m continuing with my project to port over, reformat and update a decade of old blog posts. Today, a few days in mid-October 2003; this is still my second month of blogging and I am writing at what I would … Continue reading →

Last time on FAIC we reviewed the meaning of “expected value”: when you get a whole bunch of samples from a distribution, and a function on those samples, what is the average value of the function’s value as the number … Continue reading →

Last time on FAIC I posed and solved a problem in Bayesian reasoning involving only discrete distributions, and then proposed a variation on the problem whereby we change the prior distribution to a continuous distribution, while preserving that the likelihood … Continue reading →

[It is] a spectacular vindication of the principle that each individual coin spun individually is as likely to come down heads as tails and therefore should cause no surprise that each individual time it does. Thus Guildenstern (or is it … Continue reading →

Last time on FAIC we implemented a technique for sampling from a non-normalized target PDF: Find an everywhere-larger helper PDF that we can sample from. Sample from it. Accept or reject the sample via a coin flip with the ratio … Continue reading →

Last time on FAIC we went through a loose, hand-wavy definition of what it means to have a “weighted” continuous distribution: our weights are now doubles, and given by a Probability Distribution Function; the probability of a sample coming from … Continue reading →

We’ve been mostly looking at small, discrete distributions in this series, but we started this series by looking at continuous distributions. Now that we have some understanding of how to solve probability problems on simple discrete distributions and Markov processes, … Continue reading →

[Code for this episode is here.] So far in this series we’ve very briefly looked at continuous distributions on doubles, and spent a lot of time looking at discrete distributions with small supports. Let’s take a look at a completely … Continue reading →