An Algorithmic Lucidity

Dear reader, as another year comes to a close, it is perhaps wise that we should take a few moments to reflect on what we learned here at An Algorithmic Lucidity in 2013—the year that was!

In the year 2013, this blog saw 103 posts and (at press time) 40 comments. Among these—

We heard a poem about why you should hire me. We surveyed a few numbers between 0 and 1. (Friend of the blog Grognor told me that the funniest part was the explicit disclaimer that the list was non-exhaustive. I replied that not everyone knows about the diagonalization argument—but considering this blog's, um, selective audience, maybe my readers do—all five of you!) We mentioned some hidden costs of talking about stuff. We noted that some words have substrings which are other words. I wrote a series about my experiences studying web development at App Academy (9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1). I pasted my first attempt at an OKCupid profile. We observed that I'm a moron. Books arrived in the post. We mused on the nature of personhood and implemented some classic algorithms: the Ford-Fulkerson technique somewhat clumsily in Ruby, quicksort in the form of a letter to a fictional horse, and Huffman coding in Python. We lamented the nature of existence, noticed the non-observance of an unusual tradition, and heard a poem about watching a motion picture by someone you met at university. Three problems with unsolicited advice were discussed, as was the role of bases in the theory of vector spaces, and the subjective indistinguishability of propaganda and other forms of instruction.

So that was 2013 in the year of our Common Era. But what, I hear you ask (both of you who clicked through after the break), what about twenty-fourteen? Having considered the year that was, what of the year that hasn't yet? What is your faithful correspondent thinking about writing ("thinking about writing")? Well, without giving too much away—and, come to think of it, without much of a track record of successfully predicting my future behavior—I'll say to expect more computer-scientific contrivances and more detailed fiction, but probably somewhat fewer overall posts (this last partially because I'm going to be busy contributing to world economic growth, and partially because I want to put more emphasis on the virtue of Quality rather than the virtue of Shipping). So don't touch that bookmark! The best is yet to come! I thank you for reading, and remain,

Your faithful correspondent,
Zack M. Davis

"I didn't intend for my blog to become a compendium of very short dialogues! It's just—it's just—"

"They're easier to write than anything else?"

"—they're easier to write than anything else."

"So, what do you think it—"

"It's a Turing machine."

"You didn't even look at it!"

"I don't need to!"

Is it wrong that I feel more positively disposed towards Etsy after figuring out where it must have (must have) gotten its name?

"They're going to pay you X dollars a year? But that's fantastic! You're rich!"

"I don't like the way you say that. You make it sound as if I had won the lottery."

"Lottery, new job, what's the difference? Good fortune should be celebrated."

"Not like that. If they're going to pay me X dollars a year, that means I have one year to create X dollars of economic value. It's a serious responsibility."

Beset by nights of torment,
Bent to keep your site performant,
Beneath the moon aloft there then appear
Beautied forms so gallant who
Beseech the gods of Talent to
Bequeath a junior software engineer!

You need someone specific,
One computer-scientific,
Who can complete the team at [Company Name],
Whose reputation takes repose
In repos replete with code which shows
[They put the other candidates to shame].

From graph theory to jQuery,
And matters in between,
My code Pythonic, words unironic,
I greet you through this screen
And ask, if just to highlight it,
If you've positions I might fit,
With pretense shed entirely.
I then said, "Hire me."

"I've been thinking about writing a novel."

"I don't understand."

"I said, I've been thinking about writing a novel. What's there not to understand?"

"The phrase thinking about writing. Is that even grammatical? And if so, what could it possibly mean?"

"What? It's perfectly gram—oh, I get it. Fine. No hedging: I am going to write a novel!"

"Sorry, I still don't get it. I know what it means to have written something, or to be at a keyboard writing something. But to be going to write something, in the unobservable future? Even if the concept is coherent—and I'm not sure it is—how could you possibly know?"

"Now remember: when you're negotiating salary and they press you for a number, do not reveal your BATNA. Give them an unrealistically high estimate and make them negotiate down. Now practice on me."

"Ahem. Well, sir or madam, given my demonstrated expertise and the value I could create for this company, I think a fair starting salary would be ... sixty thousand."

"No, no, no! I said—"

"Per day."

"Uh ... that's a little too—"

"In Bitcoin."

π/4, the Euler–Mascheroni constant, Chaitin's construction, the fraction of my internal narrative which consists of various rephrasings of I've been a contemptible fool; but, that's decision-theoretically irrelevant

Suppose we want to find the powerset of a given set, that is, the set of all its subsets. How might we go about it? Well, the powerset of the empty set is the set containing the empty set.

And the powerset of the union of a set S with a set containing one element e, is just the union of the powerset of S with the set whose elements are like the members of the powerset of S except that they also contain e.

So in Clojure we might say

(require 'clojure.set)

(defn include-element [collection element]
  (map (fn [set] (clojure.set/union set #{element}))
       collection))

(defn powerset [set]
  (if (empty? set)
    #{#{}}
    (let [subproblem (powerset (rest set))]
      (clojure.set/union subproblem
                         (include-element subproblem
                                          (first set))))))

Gunni told her not to touch it;
Common sense would say as much in
Plainer words, for these devices
Warrant care if not a license,
Just to view the glowing screen
Of the forbidden time machine.

It's meant for research that's historical,
Not for making oneself an oracle,
Not for giving Voltaire a tease,
Or climbing up Pangaean trees.

But Laura had a burden
In this timeline's normal version,
So she made her own incursion
To years the burden had occurred in.
No one knows just what she did,
Or how the timeline handled it,
Or how things were supposed to go
If Laura had not changed the flow.

And as we gathered in her mansion,
And I checked my gift poem's scansion,
I had to wonder why she will not tell
Why her investments have gone so well,
Or why all her enemies have come down with
Fatal but late-to-manifest genetic diseases,
Like Huntington's chorea.
I dismissed my concerns and raised my drink
To sing: Happy birthday—or so we think.