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Last time, we implemented a basic minimax algorithm for searching the game tree. Today, we will improve that using alpha-beta pruning. The benefits of alpha-beta pruning are substantial. In the best-case scenario, the number of nodes it searches is roughly the square root of the number of nodes minimax searches. We will see such gains in practice.
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It’s the end of the year, and that means that Advent of Code is over. I, like many others, find myself compelled to write about my experience solving this year’s puzzles.
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Last time, we implemented the widely unknown tafl game Ard Ri in Rust. Today, we start work on an engine that analyzes Ard Ri positions. We will develop our engine incrementally. Our first goal is a simple minimax engine that evaluates a position and proposes a best move. Future improvements will include
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Question. Whether an Ard Ri engine can be written in Rust?
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The Mojo programming language is officially open source, so what better opportunity to dig around and see what it can do? I decided on a simple graph search problem, Advent of Code Day 12, 2022.
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What began as a quick recap of my experience doing Advent of Code 2023 (my solutions) quickly devolved into a screed about what I dislike about Julia. But first, some math.
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Image: the Julia set for $f(z) = z^4 + 0.6 + 0.55i$, which the author could not elegantly work into this post.
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Let’s begin with the results, because that’s why you’re here. Go was faster than Rust in this test. I do not know why. When Go outperforms Rust, it means you’ve done something wrong in Rust. I can’t tell what. All the code is in this repo.
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In chapter XIII of Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester asks to see Jane’s painting portfolio. In an act of 19th century negging, Mr. Rochester identifies three of her paintings as most worthy:
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Kate Bush has (roughly) 29 singles that charted in the U.K. The count is a little foggy because it’s not clear what should and shouldn’t be called a single. For example, Running Up That Hill charted three times: once in 1985, supporting the Hounds of Love Album; again in 2012 as a remixed version played for the 2012 London Olympic Games; and once again in 2022 after it was used in a Stranger Things episode. So I made some executive decisions and ended up with a list of 29.
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I’ve given up following the narrative. There’s some kind of receiver and some beacons and maybe still some monkeys? I don’t know. The puzzles have gotten more challenging, more interesting, and more time-consuming.
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The elves are on their expedition. They’re building tree houses and tossing people into rivers. A computer was involved somehow. We approached this with both Rust and Haskell.
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The elves are preparing for their expedition and we’re using coding to help them do it. I’m using this year’s Advent of Code to acquire/sharpen skills in Rust and Haskell programming and the purpose of this post is to summarize my thoughts on the first five days.
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Today we have set ourselves the task of providing technically correct but actually appalling answers to some common coding exercises. The exercises under consideration are
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The source code for this post is available on my github.
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The GPS watch I bought last November was broken. Industry standard GPS watches make a recording once every second and log it to a .gpx file, but mine wasn’t doing that. Sometimes it was logging every second, sometimes it wasn’t. In this post, I explore and visualize the data logged by my failing GPS device.