Broad Update
Yes, this shall be a blog updated once every few months to say ‘I should write more’. Whatever.
ACM and AI
Starting with the current purpose of this blog, the ACM Local competition was last week; and I successfully succeeded at succeeding. First place by one problem. I went to the last two ACM contests with one of my teammates, and the other one I have a fair amount of confidence in. We shall see what happens. But, as a humorous aside to that: I very nearly implemented a Sudoku solver in under 30 minutes. Had I stopped asking myself ‘is it worth it to put in this much effort into a problem you probably won’t solve before the contest is over’; I probably could have solved it. Probably not, but maybe. I solved it using a horribly hacked together Constraint Satisfaction based Solver. For that interesting 30-50 minutes of my life, I would like to thank Robin Murphy (AI Prof), and Peter Norvig (Algorithms God/AI Book Author); both of which suggested Sudoku solving as an application of CSP. I’ll probably clean it up later and post it… as it stands currently it makes me want to cry, but it theoretically should work. (Theoretically because the test data was, in fact, invalid).
Education- Dr. Tao?
On a different note, I think I’m going to go for a PhD. This conclusion was got to by an interesting failure in my ability to communicate. As part of a follow up email, I had written the line ‘assume I go for a PhD’, which led to the thought ‘If I graduate and go into industry with a Bach, I’m going to end up drifting from job to job with mounds of uncertainty and stress’ (drifting coming from the popular consensus that a programmer should expect to change jobs every 2-3 years). If I get a PhD, there’s a lot less uncertainty in terms of job (at least I hope), I have the opportunity to interact with really incredibly frustratingly annoyingly intelligent folk, and if I go the academia route, I can torture a class of Yankee’s with ‘Howdy Class’. How can you not like that?
As a side note, I suspect the reason I was never comfortable with the thought of Grad School before is because I had never really come across something that peaked my interests. There’s a popular quote by Dijkstra: “Computer Science is no more about Computers then Astronomy is about Telescopes”. I have this odd sense that it is often misinterpreted from it’s original context. Computer Science is about the mathematical basis behind computing: proving algorithms correct, classifying problems as NP-hard, finding the most efficient way to find a correct solution, all about the theory. To me, that is what Computer Science Grad School is/was about. And I hate that definition. Mostly because it feels like something from the Ivory Tower- occasionally interesting results with only limited real world applicability. I want to generate solutions to real problems. Is making a formally proven OS kernel useful? Maybe to some, but spending 5 years to develop 10,000 lines of proven code just feels like a waste. I’ll probably regret those statements later, but, such is life.
Further side note: one thing I’ve heard fairly commonly is that in general, you don’t recoup the cost of a PhD. A master’s is worth it, but a PhD won’t earn you more over a lifetime. My response: Who cares? If you’re making a career or education choice based soley on ‘will it pay off in the end’, then you’re doing something wrong. Education (and career) should be driven off personal interest, and as an auxiliary, will it earn enough money such that you won’t live in a cardboard box. Going into advanced education because it will buy your retirement home a heated pool is just plain wrong.
Shiny New Toy- Arduino
Yet another different tact, I have a shiny new toy. An Arduino. With a product name which I can neither remember, pronounce, nor spell. I can at least remember/spell Arduino… pronunciation is still off. I blame the Italians. I got it in part because I wanted to get involved in the electronics/embedded side of computing, and mostly because it provided a convenient way to solve a problem my brother was having.
My brother, through what I assume were family connections, was hired to fix an outdoor LED sign for a bank. The company that manufactured the sign had gone out of business, but he was able to get some schematics for how the individual boards in the sign were wired. While he could take the boards down, ohm out connections, and so on, he didn’t have a convenient way of actually testing that either the repaired sign worked, or finding where issues might lie in malfunctioning boards.
I psuedo-come-in at this point. He asks me if I can write a program that would be able to test the boards. The boards themselves are driven off 4 inputs- 2 serial lines, a clock, and a latch. In the sign they’re driven off of what is probably a parallel port on a 386 running windows 98. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, future reader, but most computers these days don’t come with parallel ports. So I go through the thought process of ‘how could I go about this’; serial ports don’t really work, as at most you might be able to control voltage on two lines; we could go through the trouble of finding and installing a parallel port expansion on a testing computer, and try to write a program that would drive the port/board. And then I thought “wasn’t there something Kyle mentioned not long ago; an Arduino?”.
It fits the bill perfectly. So the short ending to this is: the first day I got it, I broke it out, did the standard “Make an LED flash” thing to see if everything was working; and the second day I built a controller for the sign boards. A bit later I added some simple configuration bits, a button to switch between testing modes, and hooked up the 9V battery so the computer became completely unnecessary. My brother has since stolen it for testing, until he can get his own.
So, I feel good about that. One thing I’ll probably post soon is a list of projects to go along with it. Y’Know, to go along with the other list of projects I’m not making progress on. I might also post more details about the sign, as it was a fun first project/jaunt into Computer Engineering.
Deutschland
I’m also planning to go to Bonn next Summer as part of a study abroad program. I’m trying to learn some German for that; and it’s coming along slowly. And that’s it. That’s all. See y’all later.
