KenKen Solver: Online!

Posted on March 13, 2009 by MXH

I ported the Python KenKen solver I was playing with last week over to JavaScript, and wrapped a GUI around it. You can check out the resulting web-based KenKen solver, if you’re interested.

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Philip K. Dick

Posted on March 12, 2009 by MXH

Philip K. Dick was a great SF writer. I think his short fiction, in particular, is extraordinary. Don’t be mislead by the mediocre movie adaptations of his stories. (E.g. “Total Recall”, “Screamers”, “Impostor”, “Minority Report”, “Paycheck”, and possibly one or two others that are not “Blade Runner”.) The original material is much more interesting, and often has a sense of fun entirely lost in the big-screen conversion.

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Bandwidth Pricing (Update)

Posted on March 11, 2009 by MXH

Last year I compared storage and bandwidth pricing between S3 and a number of hosting providers. I thought it would be interesting to check in on the bandwidth market, and see (in a highly unscientific manner) how prices have changed over the past 8 months.

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Tuples Are Slow

Posted on March 10, 2009 by MXH

Python tuples (immutable sequences) can be much slower to work with than their mutable cousins, lists. This surprised me; I would have thought they would have been faster all ’round, as they seem “simpler”. That doesn’t seem to be the case.

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The Right Time for Bad Ideas?

Posted on March 9, 2009 by MXH

There’s been a bit of a tiff between Jim Cramer, a talking-head and self-described Democrat who “favor[s] almost all of Obama’s agenda” and the White House. What I find most interesting in all this is a seeming dissonance in Cramer’s position.

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Efficiency

Posted on March 8, 2009 by MXH

Efficiency is a nice thing. It allows one to do more with less. It is not, however, an unmitigated good, as efficiency is almost always expensive. The question of whether or not efficiency is a good thing must be evaluated in a holistic context, which takes into account not only the benefits efficiency brings, but at what cost those benefits were purchased.

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Wealth

Posted on March 7, 2009 by MXH

A few thoughts on the (possibly controversial) subject of creating (or destroying) wealth. Wealth (and it’s cousin, “prosperity”) has been much on everyone’s mind recently, in light of the recent financial unpleasantness. I think that there’s been a lot of nonsense talked about it, and would like to present some of my understanding of the matter.

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A Neat Hack

Posted on March 6, 2009 by MXH

I admit to being unreasonably pleased with the following trick: The KenKen solver we’ve built and tuned can be generalized to solve Sudoku, including jigsaw Sudoku, with a 9-character change to its source code.

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Python Performance Tuning (con’t)

Posted on March 5, 2009 by MXH

Let’s wrap up our hunt for performance improvements in our KenKen puzzle solver. This sort of thing can go on nearly endlessly, of course, but after today I think we’ll have gotten most of the easy stuff, and seen dramatic gains in speed for our trouble.

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Python Performance Tuning (con’t)

Posted on March 4, 2009 by MXH

Let’s continue tuning our KenKen puzzle solver. When we left off yesterday, we’d cut execution time by 30% with a one-line change to the program, but there is still much room for improvement.

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