Earlier this year, the New York Times introduced a new word game called Letter Boxed. The game consists of a square with 12 letters evenly spaced around the edges, e.g.: The goal is to make valid words of three letters…
Exact square roots (continued)
Last week, I introduced a data structure kata involving exact square roots. At the time of that writing, I had implemented a RootTerm struct which could represent real and imaginary square roots. Today we’ll pick up where we left off…
Data structure kata: exact square roots
Many programming courses introduce the concept of data structures with complex numbers as a motivating
Know your (large) numbers
As a child, I was fascinated by large numbers. I recall being unbelievably excited when my dad gave me a clipping of a newspaper trivia column which listed the names of numbers from a million up to decillion. While most…
More four fours
Astute readers may have noticed in my previous post about the four fours that I neglected to include exponents in the set of supported mathematical operations. Well, that is fixed now. Perhaps these imagined readers also noticed that my recursive…
Four fours
Back in elementary school, I became aware of the four fours puzzle. It is a seemingly simple mathematical exercise where you must generate all the integers from 1 to 100 using arithmetic expressions and the digit 4 exactly four times.…
Distributed systems math: availability
Who doesn’t like math? (Rhetorical question, do not answer.) Today we’ll look at some simple math calculations which can help you approximate the overall availability of a distributed system. This model will assume a quorum-based protocol where a simple majority…