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Monthly Archives: March 2009
The Right Time for Bad Ideas?
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 … Continue reading
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Efficiency
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 … Continue reading
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Wealth
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 … Continue reading
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A Neat Hack
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.
Python Performance Tuning (con’t)
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 … Continue reading
Python Performance Tuning (con’t)
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.
Python Performance Tuning
Having just built a solver for KenKen puzzles, this is a good opportunity to take a look at performance tuning in Python. Today we’ll look at some basic instrumentation, and begin searching for bottlenecks in the solver.
Solver for KenKen puzzles (Search)
Today we complete the first version of our solver for KenKen puzzles. Previously we’ve defined constraint classes, input/output functions, and data structures; all that remains is to write the search and propagation code. Once again, this is all based on … Continue reading
Taste
Editorial Note: We’ll be continuing with daily posts throughout March. The rules remain the same: Contentful posts guaranteed on Fridays, luck-of-the-draw the other six days of the week. Today, for instance, you get musings on the non-transitivity of taste. Personal … Continue reading
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