01.29.07
Posted in meta at 2:06 am by danvk
If anyone’s running their blog on WordPress and hasn’t upgraded to 2.1 yet, I’d strongly recommend it. It was easy as pie, and it fixed my two biggest annoyances with wp: the “Save and Continue Editing” button now works and the bizarre image insertion interface from the old WordPress is much improved.
I’ve also got to give them snaps for their most popular ideas page. Users rate ideas, and the most popular ones get implemented in the next release. At least that’s how the theory goes.
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01.28.07
Posted in boggle, programming at 11:17 pm by danvk
After showing Evan my online boggle solver at work, I was inspired to start writing some blog posts on how that program works. So here goes!
Boggle is a game by Hasbro in which you try to find words on a 4×4 grid of letters. There are 16 dice with six letters apiece on them. You roll the dice into the 4×4 slots and connect them to form words. The longer the words you find, the more points you get.
You can use diagonals and you can cross your own path, but you can’t use the same die twice in forming a word:
As a CS-type, it wasn’t long before I started thinking about how to write a computer program to quickly find all the words on a Boggle board. The right way to think about the board is as a bidirectional graph:
To get all sequences of letters in a graph, we can just do a depth-first search. There will be a ton of these sequences, but most of them will be phrases like “aefbg” that aren’t real English words. So we’ll also need a dictionary to filter out the non-words. Then it’s just a matter of scoring:
| Length |
Score |
| 1-2 |
0 |
| 3-4 |
1 |
| 5 |
2 |
| 6 |
3 |
| 7 |
5 |
| 8-17 |
11 |
Seventeen letter words are possible! Just look at the ‘inconsequentially’ board above. The “qu” die is a minor nuisance that’ll keep coming up. It’s the only die that doesn’t have just one character on each face.
Next time we’ll code up a solution in Ruby and test its performance. After that, we’ll start looking at optimizations and how to find the highest-scoring Boggle board.
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01.26.07
Posted in tennis at 3:22 am by danvk
Those were two spectacularly bad semifinals. Federer beat Roddick 6-4, 6-0, 6-2. Not even close. He won 11 games in a row. Then tonight, Gonzo beats Tommy Haas 6-1, 6-3, 6-1. Even more of a blowout!
I really thought Roddick would push Fed in the first semifinal, but Federer played a perfect match. So did Gonzo. The final is on at 12:30 AM Saturday (PST)… I hope it’ll be worth staying up for!
(Also worth noting: Wikipedia is a surprisingly good place to track sports events)
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01.15.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:37 am by danvk
Who would have guessed? The Wave wasn’t invented until 1981, and it even has its own priority dispute! I’m taking Crazy George’s side over Rob Weller’s, since he has so much more vested in this.
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01.13.07
Posted in personal at 5:30 pm by danvk
I installed the Google Earth plugin for geocaching and looked in my area.
Jeeze. I don’t know where to start! Their Google Maps interface is less cluttered and quite well-done. If you’ve got a GPS, you have no excuse. Go caching!
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