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.
Square Root of 2
15 Friday May 2020
Posted in Fun
Category Archives: Fun
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.
John Conway’s Life
03 Sunday May 2020
Posted in Fun
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?
The Playfair Cipher
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:
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.
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.
Number Games #1
22 Friday Mar 2019
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This is a companion post to the Math Games #1 post on my main blog.
Here I present some code (Python, of course) for exploring the first two games, multiplicative persistence and the Collatz conjecture.
So Random!
01 Tuesday Jan 2019
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To ring in the new year I thought I’d play around with an old friend from my earliest programming days, a random text generator. Back then (over 30 years ago), but a little bit always, a good way to practice programming is by working on small, relatively easy, but still fun, programs.
Simple games are common choice, but not the only one. (I’ve probably written a version of Mastermind in every programming language I know.) Another fun choice is various image or text generators (or processors). Random text generators, in particular, offer a range of complexity depending on your taste and time.
Good Ol’ BASIC
13 Saturday Aug 2016
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Here’s a free verse ode to my very first computer programming language, good old BASIC:
Rare Languages
26 Tuesday Jul 2016
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Algol, BASIC, C++, computer humor, computer languages, Forth, humor, Lisp, programming language, valley girl
Cleaning out some old boxes of papers, I came across one of those humor bits that circulate in any profession. Back in the day, it was usually by fax. Then it was email, and now Tweets and other social platforms. (The song remains the same.)
This one concerned “rare” (i.e. made up) languages loosely based on existing languages. The humor depends, mostly, on recognizing parodied languages and certain other topical references (like “Valley Girls”).
In other words, a lot of the funny has sailed, but I found parts of it cute enough to record here…
