08:21 pm, 4 Feb 04
man, i wish i was in algorithms
Daisy and Tessa were walking behind me and talking about subtree costs on our way to dinner, and I felt left out.
Toby is doing some weird sort of research (all I know it involves representing propositional logic forumulas as graphs) and asked me a question about Dijkstra's algorithm (which I get to be the expert on, because I'm the networks TA) and together we discovered Dial's implementation (warning: tiny text!). That's pretty neat.
I know very close to nothing about algorithms.
Speaking of algorithms, I found my copy of the LJ friends export Brad did a while back. It's from mid-2003, and I think there are 14 million edges in it. The datafile obfuscates userids into random integers, but they're unfortunately 32-bit integers and OCaml* can only do 31-bit integers quickly on x86. So I wrote a C program to reprocess them down to smaller integers (there's only around a million nodes, after all) and produce a binary format and the file is still like a hundred megs.
And from there, I don't know what to do with it. I wanna do popularity contests or whatever but without userids it's not too interesting.
* Of course I'm using OCaml. Duh. :P
Toby is doing some weird sort of research (all I know it involves representing propositional logic forumulas as graphs) and asked me a question about Dijkstra's algorithm (which I get to be the expert on, because I'm the networks TA) and together we discovered Dial's implementation (warning: tiny text!). That's pretty neat.
I know very close to nothing about algorithms.
Speaking of algorithms, I found my copy of the LJ friends export Brad did a while back. It's from mid-2003, and I think there are 14 million edges in it. The datafile obfuscates userids into random integers, but they're unfortunately 32-bit integers and OCaml* can only do 31-bit integers quickly on x86. So I wrote a C program to reprocess them down to smaller integers (there's only around a million nodes, after all) and produce a binary format and the file is still like a hundred megs.
And from there, I don't know what to do with it. I wanna do popularity contests or whatever but without userids it's not too interesting.
* Of course I'm using OCaml. Duh. :P
So, basically, you want to do a popularity contest, but you're not cool enough to know who everyone is? =)
Out of curiousity, what would you consider average as far as knowledge of algorithms goes? Are you speaking more in terms of history, or methods for the study/development/verification of algorithms?
I'm always really curious as to where people generally draw the line between "a 2 year student at a 4 year college" "competent" and "wunderkind", because I always wonder if I should be doing more to get to the point where I'm at least firmly in the middle.
Re:
I just haven't ever really studied real algorithms. I'm familiar with a bunch by name or by purpose, but (for example) I couldn't tell you what A* does.Re:
we talking about the search methodology? I actually do know that one, but I don't know some of the other ones mentioned here.Mebbe it's because A* search is used in linguisticky applications all the time.
Re:
was the one you gave me "obfuscated"?--scott