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
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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.
10 Friday May 2019
Posted in Fun
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.
22 Friday Mar 2019
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.
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.
13 Saturday Aug 2016
Posted in Fun
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Here’s a free verse ode to my very first computer programming language, good old BASIC:
26 Tuesday Jul 2016
Posted in Fun
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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…
19 Tuesday Jul 2016
Posted in Fun
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In the process of cleaning out boxes of old paperwork, I found this company memo, circa early 1980s, that describes a “simpler” way to send email. At the time, email systems were mainframe-based text systems you logged onto and typed at — actually not terribly unlike the web-based email systems today.
The memo reminds me of how it was back then and of how far we’ve come since. Here it is, reproduced as is:
14 Monday Mar 2016
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For Pi Day I published a post on my main blog, Logos Con Carne. Here is the Python code behind the data generated in that post.
The Hard-Core Coder 