Warning: this post got embarrassingly long. For the short version, read up through the paragraph that starts with "If you use ( Read more... )

Suppose you could create the specification for your ideal programming language. It must be possible to implement (it can't solve undecidable problems, etc), but other than that the sky's the limit. What would you put in it (what kind of syntax, intrinsics, etc)? For what sort of applications would it be used? What other features would it have? ( Read more... )

So, even before I get to the what the algorithm does (which is quite interesting on its own, even before you find out how it accomplishes that), the very first intriguing part is its name. It's officially referred to as the Blum-Floyd-Pratt-Rivest-Tarjan Algorithm. Is your mouth watering yet? I thought so.1 However, CLRS refers to it as the Select ( Read more... )

I've found another interesting wrinkle in the ternary operator. So, here's a bonus question for that quiz from last time. You start with the following code:class Abstract;
class DerivedOne; // Inherits from Abstract
class DerivedTwo; // Inherits from Abstract
Abstract x;
DerivedOne one;
DerivedTwo two;
bool test;
Again, you can assume that all of these ( Read more... )

In today's installment of "why not to program in C++," I give you the following quiz, which Dustin, Steve, Tom, and I had to figure out today (Dustin's code was doing the weirdest things, and we eventually traced it down to this):

Suppose you start out with the following code:class Argument;
Argument x;
void Foo(const Argument& arg);
bool test;
You ( Read more... )

Admittedly, I can't think of an uncontrived use case when I would prefer this to a hash table, union find, or traditional bit field, but I still think this is a pretty cool concept. It's a data structure to hold n items, with constant time initialization (i.e. you can't initialize all n items at the beginning), and constant time random access. ( Read more... )

I've been working off and on to find the optimal strategy for the final round of a game of liar's poker. I've gotten a bit farther on it, and it now looks solveable. I've now solved the 12-card deck version (i.e. if the deck only contains aces, kings, and queens), and I suspect I've got an algorithm that will solve the whole problem in a reasonable ( Read more... )

I recently wrote about a card game called Liar's Poker and my endeavours to find an optimal strategy for the final round. Some extra progress has been made, but it's still a long ways off. Despite what I wrote when I edited my previous post, I'm no longer convinced that we can adapt Simplex or a gradient descent algorithm to solve this. It turns ( Read more... )

Liar's Poker is a card game we sometimes play around the office. It's a pretty simple game to learn if you're already familiar with poker hands: ( the rules to Liar's Poker )

This weekend I went to Defcon 0xF with psifer and inferno0069, and it was a blast.

• I stopped at Arby's for lunch on the way there. I wanted two roast beef sandwiches and a small fries, the total of which came to $7.63. I then looked at their menu, and saw they still do the "5 items for $5.95" thing. So I canceled my original order and instead got two roast beef ( Read more... )