In my research, I work with a lot of rather large text files–on the order of gigabytes if not terabytes per file. Since they’re plain text, they’re generally rather compressible though, so it makes sense to gzip them while they’re on disk. The drawback though comes when you’re working with them. There are a few options though.
So far, we’ve had three different ideas for figuring out the author of an unknown paper (top n word ordering in Part 1 and stop word frequency / 4-grams in Part 2). Here’s something interesting though from the comments on the Programming Praxis post:
Globules said July 19, 2013 at 12:29 PM Patrick Juola has a guest post on Language Log describing the approach he took.
Last time, we used word rank to try to figure out who could possibly have written Cuckoo’s calling. It didn’t work out so well, but we at least have a nice framework in place. So perhaps we can try a few more ways of turning entire novels into a few numbers.
About two weeks ago, the new crime fiction novel Cuckoo’s Calling was revealed to have actually been written by J.K. Rowling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. What’s interesting is exactly how they came to that conclusion. Here’s a quote from Time magazine (via Programming Praxis):
Almost four months ago, I started writing a series on how to write a roguelike in Racket. I believed then as I believe now that Racket is an excellent all around language and that I would like to see more done with it–particularly in games.
Last week we made mazes on a regular grid using the noise generators. That was pretty neat, but it got me thinking. What other ways do we have to procedurally generate interesting level patterns?
Two Programming Praxis puzzles in a week? Madness! Let’s do it!
This time, the puzzle at first seems rather minimal:
Write a function f so that f(f(n)) = -n for all integers n.
If you haven’t seen this problem before, take a moment to think though it. It’s a neat little problem–a close cousin to a lateral thinking puzzle.
I think by now it’s well past time that we got to adding a bit more content. So far, here’s what we have (bolded entries we actually used in day 8):
We can do better than that though!
It’s been rather a while since I’ve worked out a Programming Praxis problem, but they posted a new one yesterday, so now seems as good a time as any. The problem is relatively simple:
Given a linked list, swap the kth node from the head of the list with the kth node from the end of the list.
Since all lists in Scheme are linked lists, that part seems easy enough. To make the problem a little more interesting however, I’m going to work it out in a purely functional manner: no mutation.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, surely an animated GIF is worth a few more than that. 😄