Category Archives: Fun

A Simple DL Parser

10 Wednesday Nov 2021

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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.

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Playing with Polynomials

01 Monday Nov 2021

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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.

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Multiplication Visualized

01 Tuesday Sep 2020

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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.

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Life With Class

07 Thursday May 2020

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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.

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John Conway’s Life

03 Sunday May 2020

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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?

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The Eight Queens

23 Sunday Jun 2019

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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.

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Adventures in Address Vector Space

10 Friday May 2019

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Lately I’ve been exploring the idea of a vector space with a large number of dimensions (but few degrees of freedom). A model was presented with five degrees of freedom in 500 dimensions (neurons, as it happens).

The question is, given the axes are bit-level, does normal vector manipulation semantics make sense. My contention is it has severe problems.

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