I wonder how many completely u related applications have that interval check logic coded up somewhere. I'm pretty sure I wrote one for my work codebase. Would I bet my life that the < and <=s are correct? Nope.
Yes that's a brilliant article. I do not think it is in the book yet?
I used a poor man's version to solve a puzzle where one arranges polymino pieces on a grid spelling out the date [1]. No pointers, just keeping track of deleted rows and columns in the recursion.
It is not at all obvious that all 366 days can be solved. To my dismay all of them can be solved in multiple ways - as a human I find some days quite tricky.
It is in the book, it’s a big part of 4B, which was published in 2022. The main topics are backtracking, exact cover using Dancing Links and satisfiability. It’s my favorite volume of the whole bunch.
Hey I am trying to get back into German. What are some of the good channels that you've found? I remember Fokus Deutsch.
Spent 4 years in Germany but never took a course out of sheer laziness. I can read children's books but every native speaker sounds like they are zipping along at 2x speed.
> I can read children's books but every native speaker sounds like they are zipping along at 2x speed.
I generally play most of the podcasts at double-speed precisely because of this. Real speakers are much faster than the careful slow pace of most internet content, and double-speed playback forces me to develop gist-comprehension even if I miss the odd word here or there.
I wrote my own solver in Python+Numba. You've probably seen Robot Reboot https://www.robotreboot.com/challenge. I had a parser that could take a screenshot of the daily puzzles and feed them into my engine. Your post might just give me the kick in the pants to put it up online.
Curious if think this made you better at RR. I started out absolutely terrible, and actually got to the point where I could occasionally match the best scores on Reboot (but not their times of course!).
I think it has made be better. At the very least it shows some techniques like moving forward and back and highlights some approaches that I missed.
I generally solve the puzzle "backwards", looking at how the robot can approach the goal. So if you miss a possible approach it can definitely result in me missing a solution. Filling these gaps is valuable.
It also provides some intuition about how long puzzles are in different scenarios which helps you decide how to look.
But overall I would say that it is mainly curiosity why I use the solver. It is interesting to know if we actually found the best solution or how often we miss it.
That said, I am puzzled at the algorithms that Claude & GPT "get" and ones that they do not.
(former physicist here. would love to know the kind of things you're working on. email on my profile)
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