The Thue-Morse Sequence that shows over infinite tries the “fairest” way for two people to take turns when choosing things from a pool (i.e. drafting players for a kick-ball team). Matt Parker has a very entertaining YouTube video on the subject and John D. Cook has a clear example as well. Between two players the…
Meditation: the Brain’s API for Intuition
Programming can be hard. It’s common to sit with a programming problems for hours, days, or weeks until settling on a solution. After spending extended periods with a problem the mind often settles into fixed views of problems and solutions. Adopting fixed views in problem solving reduces the likelihood of discovering creative and elegant solutions.…
Field Guide for the Bored Programmer Part 1: The Dos
This post is a little different than the typical content I’ve been trying to write on this blog, but after a few disparaging comments on reddit, I figured I’d try my hand at something a little less technical and a little more authentic. One of my personality traits is that I don’t like to stay…
Addition of Very Large Numbers
It’s not uncommon to get to a point in mathematics or programming that very large numbers must be dealt with. For the context of this post I will define a very large number (VLN) as any number that exceeds the maximum value of an unsigned 64-bit integer (aka ulong.MaxValue or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615). It’s surprisingly easy to…
Combining For-Loops: Simplifying Finite Recursion
Often in programming we are interested in dealing with collections of data. In the post Investigating Basic Combinatorics, we looked at the very basics of calculating how many unique combinations of objects we could create with finite choices of objects. Today, we are going to look at putting these combinations together. Let’s start with a…
Investigating Basic Combinatorics
In programming and in math we are often interested in how many possible combinations of objects exist. For example: how many 5-hand cards can be made from a 52-card deck? In mathematics these are referred to as combinatorics problems. Many basic combination problems can be evaluated with the formula: The formula is verbally stated as…
Finding Divisors And Prime Factors
Finding Divisors A divisor (D) of a number (N) is an integer that divides another integer with no remainder. In other words N mod D = 0. Sometimes, we are interested in finding all divisors of a number. If we are considering a programming solution to this problem, chances are we are dealing with very…
Prime Number Testing
A prime number (or a prime) is defined as a positive integer greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. If I wanted a programmatic test that a number is prime, my first instinct in C# would look something like this: static bool IsPrime(int number) { for(int i = 2;…