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Print Story That was a terrible chess game.
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By gzt (Wed Oct 12, 2011 at 02:54:11 PM EST) gzt, books, sort algorithms (all tags)
I got into trouble early and missed my chance to get rid of the trouble. Then I lost. The end.

However, I finished off Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. It was quite good and did not have the characteristic flop of an ending, though. The annoying part now will be sorting back out which elements of the history were real and which forged. For instance, it drove out whatever real knowledge I had of Charles' CABAL. The only one I remember is George Villiers, the "B".


When I read the back, I saw that Bela Bollobas had helped him do some stuff for the book. DUDE. He also had a long list of authors whose work helped, and he included Borwein on it, which was interesting to me only because I ran into his work the other day when somebody posted a link about the Borwein integral: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borwein_integral I then looked at one of his "fun" big number papers and the fun big number paper by some other guy which was linked on the wikipedia page: http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3943v1 .

For fun recently I started poking around in Linear Algebra Methods in Combinatorics, a manuscript by one of my former professors who was himself a student of Erdos, that's where I have my exposure to Bollobas's work.

The wifing unit is rather avidly watching the new Doctor Who on her own. I accidentally spoiled that Donna Noble is coming back, but it doesn't really ruin anything other than the show itself (least favorite companion ever). Unfortunately, her enthusiasm for the new series makes her less enthusiastic for the old.

Quick algorithms question: when you have a pile of things, like, books on a bookshelf, that you want to sort manually for some reason, what method do you typically gravitate toward? I often use variants of insertion sort (optimized by the fact that a human eye can see a bunch of things at once and be a little bit intelligent) if I have a small list, since it's not terribly intensive from a "shuffling of books" point of view even if it's "computationally" expensive in the average case, since "shuffling books" is the real "cost" and "computations" are cheap. Heap sort is impractical, for instance, because I can't build a heap. Bubble sort - slightly modified to fix "turtles" - also comes up, but there's a lot of shoving things around. None of these get done strictly.

I'm now reading The Master of Hestviken, a set of four books by Sigrid Undset. I'm on the second book. I will go back to George R R Martin when I get the book. Update [2011-10-12 22:36:10 by gzt]:And I got 100% on my data mining test. Apparently some people did not? Perhaps they were undergrads, as this is a cross-listed grad/undergrad course, and undergrads don't realize you're supposed to learn all the material and prepare for tests.

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That was a terrible chess game. | 7 comments (7 topical, 0 hidden)
sorts by ucblockhead (4.00 / 1) #1 Wed Oct 12, 2011 at 03:28:51 PM EST
For large sets of items, I use a partition sort.  I sort in buckets by some easily recognizable obvious feature.  (For example, first letter, or first digit.)  Then I use insertion sort on each bucket.

I find this works well with human perception.  An insertion sort becomes unwieldy for too large a number of items.
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[ucblockhead is] useless and subhuman

I use a quick sort by Orion Blastar (2.00 / 0) #2 Thu Oct 13, 2011 at 01:40:45 AM EST
organize books by subject so all my programming books are in one area by language and platform and all my business books are in another area grouping accounting, finances, business management into their own sub groups.

Sometimes my wife comes in and then reorganized it by alphabet and I have to start all over again.

"I drank what?" - Socrates after drinking the Conium
but that seems to require... by gzt (2.00 / 0) #5 Thu Oct 13, 2011 at 08:04:18 AM EST
...quite a bit of a "buffer" and a lot of shuffling. I mean, you pick a pivot and then pull out all the books that go before that book and after it, that's a lot of picking up of books.

[ Parent ]
Good exercise by Orion Blastar (2.00 / 0) #7 Thu Oct 13, 2011 at 01:22:19 PM EST
when I got 1000+ page books.

"I drank what?" - Socrates after drinking the Conium
[ Parent ]
I recently picked up Bollobas' by the mariner (2.00 / 0) #3 Thu Oct 13, 2011 at 01:49:23 AM EST
Random graphs book. Seems like an interesting subject, but never bothered to learn anything about it.

When they say "linear algebra" are they talking integer programming problems in graph theory or spectral properties of associated matrices? If the latter, that's pretty cool material, imo. If the former, I was reading something on James Fallows' blog of all places a few months ago about how apparently there've been these major advances in integer programming solvers in the past decade and that it's a big deal in industry. Have you ever heard anything like that? This kind of stuff just totally flies under my radar. 

I tried to find a listing of the table of contents by gzt (2.00 / 0) #4 Thu Oct 13, 2011 at 08:02:29 AM EST
on the internets, but couldn't, so I found a course which uses the book and covers a lot of what's in it: http://www.math.ucla.edu/~bsudakov/algebraic.html

and we spent a lot of time on crap like this: http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~laci/reu04/n12.pdf

[ Parent ]
I sort my books by colour. by ammoniacal (2.00 / 0) #6 Thu Oct 13, 2011 at 10:01:52 AM EST
Still looking for UV and IR bookends.

"To this day that was the most bullshit caesar salad I have every experienced..." - triggerfinger

That was a terrible chess game. | 7 comments (7 topical, 0 hidden)

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