Mojo Is Not Ready for Advent of Code
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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.
Blog posts
2024
Ard Ri in Rust, Part 2: Minmax and Our First Engine
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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
Ard Ri in Rust, Part 1
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Question. Whether an Ard Ri engine can be written in Rust?
Building a queue in Mojo
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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.
Advent of Code 2023 or: Things I don’t like about Julia
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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.
2023
Benchmarking Mojo, Julia, and Python + NumPy
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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.
Comparing Go and Rust performance for a high-throughput HTTP server
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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.
AI Interpretations of Jane Eyre’s Paintings
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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:
Ranking Kate Bush Songs With Svelte (and ChatGPT)
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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.
2022
Advent of Code 2022 Days 11-15 in Rust and Haskell
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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.
Advent of Code 2022 Days 6-10 in Rust and Haskell
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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.
Advent of Code 2022 Days 1-5 in 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.
Optimal but terrible answers to common coding interview questions
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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
Creating a CTA bus tracker with go
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The source code for this post is available on my github.
Analyzing a broken GPS watch with pandas
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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.