Take a look at xkcd's election predictor. It scrapes a bunch of election outcome probabilities per state from intrade and uses them to provide a prediction for the overall election. It does so by using a Monte Carlo simulation, given the probabilities, it runs a mock election assuming each state outcome is independent a whole bunch of times with ( Read more... )

From a reddit post I made a month ago.

There are n! paths in a graph of size n. I can find the optimal TSP solution in O(n^2 2^n) time. Therefore, it is possible to do better than examine every path to find a TSP solution ( Read more... )

So, I wish I could say I was over this, but I am still having bouts of sadness and self-induced frustration. But at least I am having dreams about algorithms, which you know, kind of rocks. Even if my ability to reason in my dreams is laughably bad ( Read more... )