possiblywrong

8 ms·

1.
by possiblywrong 3mo ago
The article deserves several clarifications: > The deck has to be cut more or less in half before shuffling. "More or less" is doing some heavy lifting here. The original GSR shuffling model cuts the deck at a point that is bi
2.
Beware the "Natural" Quaternion(possiblywrong.wordpress.com)
3 points by possiblywrong 4mo ago|0 comments
3.
by possiblywrong 9mo ago
Following is the closed form solution linked in the article (from a since-deleted Reddit comment): from functools import reduce def recurrence(ops, a0, n): def transform(x, op): return eval(repr(x) + op)
4.
by possiblywrong 9mo ago
It's interesting that the two forward versions of the algorithm were added to Wikipedia just a few months ago. (The OP article is from 2020.)
5.
The Fisher-Yates shuffle is backward(possiblywrong.wordpress.com)
65 points by possiblywrong 9mo ago|20 comments
6.
Hierarchical field sort with string interning(nullprogram.com)
1 points by possiblywrong 1y ago|0 comments
7.
by possiblywrong 1y ago
> Second, the least significant bits that come from this generator are biased. I don't think this is true; I'm guessing that the author borrowed this observation from one of the various other articles linked in this thread, tha
8.
by possiblywrong 2y ago
You are correct. The first example time in the article, "2024-12-25 at 18:54:53 UTC", corresponds to POSIX timestamp 1735152893, not 1735152686. And there have been 27 leap seconds since the 1970 epoch, not 29.
9.
by possiblywrong 2y ago
Author of the linked article here; you're right that just the expected number of guesses is roughly monotonic. However, that expected number of guesses (along with Ballmer's expected payout) increases , not decreases, as N increa
10.
by possiblywrong 2y ago
> Note that if F(x,y)=0, then the point (x,y) is exactly on the circle. If F(x,y)>0, then the point is outside of the circle, and if F(x,y)<0 then the point is inside of it. In other words, given any point (x,y), F(x,y) is the dis
11.
There Is No Equilux(possiblywrong.wordpress.com)
1 points by possiblywrong 3y ago|0 comments
12.
by possiblywrong 3y ago
There was some amount of "standardization" of checksum methods to help with debugging typos. For example, Nibble magazine used a couple of programs-- the one I remember using was Key Perfect-- that would scan your program in memor
13.
by possiblywrong 3y ago
Author of the linked article here; re marking movement of shadows, I wrote a follow-up that discusses some alternatives, mainly that one: https://possiblywrong.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/using-a-watch...
14.
by possiblywrong 7y ago
> You don't need to manually count, just make sure all the circles are the correct colors. I guess this takes me a while, and seems significantly more error-prone to me than the corresponding re-count when they are sorted. Granted,
15.
by possiblywrong 7y ago
Author of the article here; I suppose I should confess that I did consider automating the counting, which did seem like an interesting problem... but I rejected the idea, for what I think is good reason: the sorting was the time-consuming p
16.
by possiblywrong 7y ago
Author of the article here; you have a point that there is no explicit discussion of validating this assumption, beyond the variability shown in the colored curves in the "count per pack" plot. Having said that, this small sample
17.
by possiblywrong 7y ago
Author of the article here-- right! This was the key "real world" motivation for this experiment as an attempt at a pedagogical tool; from the article: > As an aside, I think the fact that this particular concrete application h
18.
by possiblywrong 7y ago
Author of the article here; this is a great point. This experiment initially stemmed from a nice analytical solution to the problem of computing the expected value (via generating functions as described in the post). Computing other moments
19.
by possiblywrong 12y ago
> "For these reasons, I'm actually a bit surprised that the author's data matches the theory so closely... The fit is so perfect I actually suspect he... ah... played with his data slightly after the fact. A "fortuito