03 Thursday Mar 2022
Posted in Fun
It’s been a while since I posted here, many balls in the fire and irons in the air, so I thought I’d dig into my archives for an oldie, albeit one more of tin than of gold.
This one comes from a 1995 email from a co-worker who was forwarding something cute she’d found in a Delphi Forum.
10 Friday Dec 2021
I’m not sure how I got to thinking about Turing Machines (TMs). I was going through some files recently and spent some time looking at busy-beaver.c (from 2017 according to the file date). It contains an implementation of a TM. But something else got me speculating about my own implementation; I just don’t recall what.
I decided to actually write it when it occurred to me that I could use a Python generator to implement the Turing Machine tape. Sadly, I didn’t think of it in time for the trilogy I just published about Python generators (part 1, part 2, part 3).
10 Wednesday Nov 2021
Tags
computer code, language design, little programming language, Python code, recursive descent parser
Last time I introduced a general Definition Language (DL) I created for defining structured information. The end goal was an extension of DL, called Data Definition Language (DDL), intended for defining memory and file formats. It was intended for tools that examine that data, allowing them more knowledgeable output than a raw hex dump.
I mentioned that DL has been on my mind lately, and as it turns out I spent the day yesterday writing a DL parser in Python.
01 Monday Nov 2021
Tags
I haven’t put nearly the energy into this blog as I have my main blog, Logos Con Carne. My intentions are good, but somehow I never seem to get around to posting here. (It’s certainly not due to lack of interest.)
In an attempt to get more in the habit, I thought I’d write about some simple fun I had recently with a class for calculating polynomials. It was inspired by a lesson from a set of really fun Python tutorial YouTube videos.
01 Tuesday Sep 2020
Tags
Cartesian product, computer code, Japanese multiplication method, math, multiplication, Pillow (PIL fork), Python code
On my regular blog I just posted about a Japanese visual multiplication method. It’s a cute trick that ties into the notion of grid multiplication techniques. (In general, multiplication techniques are of some interest due to the Mandelbrot set, which requires multiplying large numbers lots of times.)
It turns out code to generate the patterns was a lot easier than I thought it would be. The hardest part was generating the diagonal summing lines.
15 Friday May 2020
Posted in Fun
Tags
This post contains some simple code for calculating the square root of 2 and then generating the bits of the value.
It’s a companion to a post on my other blog.
07 Thursday May 2020
Last time I showed you the functions necessary for Life — for John Conway’s game of Life, that is. We ended up with a set of functions you can use to generate frames of a Life session.
This time I’ll show you an object-oriented version (a Life class) along with some other tweaks to make things look nicer.
03 Sunday May 2020
You may have heard that mathematician John Conway died last April. To his everlasting dismay, most people only know him for his “game” of Life (which he considered trivial and inferior to his real mathematical work). Unfortunately for Conway, his Life game is fascinating.
To honor his passing, I whipped up a Python version that I thought I’d share. Python is about the only language I’ve used a lot in which I’ve never implemented Life, so high time I did, right?
27 Sunday Oct 2019
Earlier this month, on my other blog, I wrote about the Playfair Cipher, a polygraphic substitution cipher invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1854.
At the time I mused about writing some Python to automate using the cipher, and now I’ve done that, so here it is:
23 Sunday Jun 2019
Tags
There’s a fairly simple puzzle, called The Eight Queens, that I’ve long favored as a project for first semester CS students. The problem is simple enough for a beginner to tackle, yet also interesting enough to be engaging. (And just tricky enough to be a nice beginner challenge.)
Due to a discussion on my other blog, I dug out an old Python implementation I had, and, after looking at it, I thought it might be worth writing a post about. If nothing else, as I said, the problem is interesting enough to be engaging.
The Hard-Core Coder 