I got to see Steve Wozniak speak at Columbia University last night, promoting his new book iWoz. Strongest impression: The man has an incredible amount of energy. He talked in a strong voice at high speed for nearly an hour before rushing off to tape a spot on The Colbert Report. Most [...]
Been too busy with work and class to post much, but here’s a link for all the IANALs out there: Project Posner. It’s an on-line database collecting the case opinions of Richard A. Posner, judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. This was the brainchild of law professor and former Posner clerk [...]
I’m playing some more with the early chapters of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, looking at basic tree search techniques for the 8-puzzle. I wrote simple breadth-first and depth-first search algorithms for this puzzle in Common Lisp. Here’s the code. It’s an interesting demonstation of how inefficient these alogrithms really are.
I represent [...]
Ran across an interesting remark in a discussion of Microsoft hiring interviews:
If I remember, a lot of MIT people back in the 70s broke the computer world into the Lisp and non-Lisp data typers. The Lisp folk took a casual attitude towards data structures - just shove them in a list, put them on a [...]
I was looking at a problem in the early chapters of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. It’s called Vacuum World. This is a very simple agent problem consisting of a vacuum placed on a grid. The grid has only two squares, each of which is either dirty or clean. The vacuum [...]
I decide to play around with the Java logging facility. I write a simple test program:
import java.util.logging.*;
public class LoggingTest {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Logger log = Logger.getLogger(”com.stuartsierra”);
log.entering(”LoggingTest”, “main”);
log.info(”Info Message”);
log.warning(”Warning Message”);
log.exiting(”LoggingTest”, “main”);
}
}
Compile, run, and I get this:
Aug 30, 2006 10:48:45 AM LoggingTest main
INFO: Info Message
Aug 30, [...]