Frivolous Studies

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. That’s partly because my RPG files are on a Linux box whose copy of Thunderbird is acting flaky, but mostly because I’m just not in the habit of blogging every day. Writing, yes. Blogging, no. Besides, everyone interested in the Flip RPG probably e-mailed me about it already.

I will get back to posting about that, but I might as well fill you in on what I’ve been up to the past few days instead.

Read more »

Before I post anything else, I’d like to share a little toy program I wrote to calculate binomial distributions with p = 0.5; which is to say, fair coin tosses. These are more formally known as Bernoulli trials.

Give the number of coin flips to the program as its command-line argument. For my purposes, I found it useful to display, in the second column, the probability of getting exactly that many successes, and in the third column, the probability of getting at least that many successes,

The major improvement I could have made, but didn’t, is that instead of recalculating the factorials for each iteration of the outer loop, I could have used dynamic programming techniques to calculate them only once, and look them up. This would have reduced the time complexity from O(N²) to O(N), but whether it would actually speed up the program on any particular computer is doubtful. C is also not really the best language for this job, although it worked just fine.

I’m releasing it, under the MIT/X License, below the cut:

Read more »

I originally wrote these posts as a single e-mail, but at some point around 2,000 words, I realized that it was far too long to drop into the lap of the person with whom I’d originally been corresponding, much less anyone else I was adding to the Cc: line. (By the way, I consider that adequate warning.) So, I’ve broken it up into several posts, starting with this one.

The project I’m working on right now, not at all strenuously, is a table-top role-playing game. More precisely, it’s an attempt to develop a set of invariants that will produce a balanced and playable role-playing game, and a system of elegant rules built around those invariants. If each rule has a good justification, but plays straightforwardly and works well even for someone who doesn’t know why it works, I will count myself successful. This naturally won’t happen soon, and in fact may never be finished.

I call it the Flip RPG, because it’s neither particularly grim nor gritty and because one of its key methods is the figurative coin flip. The idea occurred to me the other day while I was reading through a statistics textbook. It’s still at an early enough design stage that the name could become a misnomer.

Read more »

There’s a good chance that you’re here from my other blog, in which case you already know who I am. If not, I’m a man in Portland, Oregon who recently went back to school, to finish his degrees in math and computer science, and participated in Google Summer of Code 2008. It’s still technically too soon to say how I did. More relevant at the moment is the fact that I blogged my work on the project, more regularly than not, and that a few people wanted to keep reading.

I’ll say up front that I’ll be honest with you, but you shouldn’t expect a confessional. I don’t plan on writing a great deal about my private life. I also don’t plan on writing much, if anything, about politics. I actually follow the topic pretty closely and have some strong opinions. They’re more or less what you’d expect from a young Jew living in Portland, Oregon. I just hate how political debates on the Internet turn out. (And yes, that’s me actually defending George Bush for once, against a ridiculous accusation. The other blogger has left the conversation up as a testament to her graciousness and open mind, but she also decided that further comments from me are not welcome, which I do not consider my loss. You may judge for yourself.) If I do bring up the subject, I’ll probably disable comments on the post, and I’d appreciate it if you not defeat my intent by debating me in a different comment thread.

What will I write about, then? I’m thinking that it will mainly be whatever side project I’m working on at the moment, but l'homme propose, Dieu dispose. Right now, I’m doing something utterly frivolous, with no deadline. It’s a great change of pace. My immediate reason for starting this new blog now, I will confess, is that I found myself writing an e-mail about it that was so long, it really ought to be several blog posts instead. So, that's how I'll publish it. I'll probably want to throw up a web page for it in the near future.