Viewing posts by christian
The Brachistochrone problem
Posted by: christian on 30 Mar 2017
The Brachistochrone problem asks the question "what is the shape of the curve down which a bead sliding from rest and accelerated by gravity will slip, without friction, from one fixed point, $P_1$ to another $P_2$ in the least time?"
Solving word wheels
Posted by: christian on 24 Mar 2017
The Guardian is one of several newspapers which publish a daily "word wheel" puzzle: eight letters are arranged in a circle around a central letter and the goal is to make as many words as possible including the central letter and using each letter once. The words should be more than 4 letters in length.
Finding anagrams with a trie
Posted by: christian on 23 Mar 2017
A trie is an ordered tree data structure often used to store word lists, for example, for auto-complete applications. Each node in the tree is associated with a letter; the association of nodes with each other (parents, children, grandchildren, etc.) orders the letters into words. For example, the simple dictionary consisting only of the words "bat", "ball", "coo", "cow" and "cowl" could be represented by the trie in the figure below, in which the black circles indicate nodes which represent word terminators.
The Goldbach Comet
Posted by: christian on 22 Mar 2017
Goldbach's conjecture is probably one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics. It states that
Wa-Tor World
Posted by: christian on 10 Mar 2017
Wa-Tor is a population dynamics simulation described by Alexander Dewdney in Scientific American (1984): "Computer Recreations: Sharks and fish wage an ecological war on the toroidal planet Wa-Tor".