Month: January 2017

This is an analysis and design of a program to allow someone to play the numbers game from the British game show Countdown on a computer. First we’ll review the rules of the game and then we’ll explore techniques for implementing them on a computer.

The numbers game is played with a board of cards containing numbers face down. There are four cards containing either 25, 50, 75, or 100, and twenty cards containing two each of the numbers from 1 to 10. The player specifies six cards to be drawn, between zero and four from the large numbers and the rest drawn from the small numbers. The numbers drawn are revealed and a random number between 0 and 999 is generated. The player then attempts to combine the six numbers using the four arithmetic functions, +, *, -, and /, in order to get as close as possible to the number generated. Ten points are awarded for matching the number exactly, seven points are awarded for an answer between 1 and 5 numbers from the target, and five points are awarded for an answer between 6 and 10 numbers from the target.

The generation of the target is a simple matter since all modern computer languages have a pseudo random number generator which, when combined with some arbitrary parameter such as a portion from the extremely small end of the system clock, provides a truly arbitrary result. For example, if the user were to press the button to generate a target at a time when the nanosecond portion of the system clock contained 345, you might multiply that number by the next pseudo random number returned by the generator and then scale it to be between 0 and 999.

The cards would be handled differently. First, we would declare an array of four big cards and 20 little cards. We would initialize those arrays with the values of the cards that are specified in the rules. Then, we would run an shuffling algorithm, some arbitrary number of times on the big number array, and another arbitrary number of times on the small number array.

The shuffling algorithm would work by generating a pair of distinct random number between zero and three in the case of the big numbers and between zero and nineteen in the case of the little numbers. These numbers would serve as indexes into the respective arrays. For example, you might generate 1 and 3 for the big number array. This would indicate that you should swap the element with an index of 1 with the element with an index of 3. You would repeat this operation some arbitrary number of times generated by calling the random number generator, scaling by a large number and then adding a large number to insure a large minimum number. If you generated a number between 0 and 100 and scaled it by 1000000 and then added 37584 as a minimum you would guarantee that the array would be shuffled between 37584 and 1037584 times. You would shuffle the small numbers in a similar fashion.

Now, given a target number between 1 and 999 and six cards containing numbers that can be used to derive the target, it only remains to give the player 30 seconds to come up with a solution to the problem. But how do we determine if the puzzle even has a solution?

First, we take every combination of the six numbers drawn taken one, two, three, four, five, or six at a time and we combine them using every possible combination of operators. We take each result and store it as either an exact match, a match plus or minus five from the target, a match between six and ten from the target, or else we discard it. Thus, we now know if the puzzle is solvable and we can check the answer that the player gives.

And that is how we analyze and design a program to play the Countdown numbers game. I will use this analysis to actually implement the game. Another time, I’ll analyze and design a program to play the Countdown letters game.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

For the last three Sunday nights we have watched a three part series that tracked the history of the musical from the early twentieth century through the present. It reminded me of why I was so moved by musicals and even had ambitions to create rock musicals when I was a teenager.

In my case, other things distracted me and I never followed through with my ambition. What I discovered watching this series was exactly how amazing the intervening years have been. I have remained vaguely aware of many of the productions and even saw the movie versions of some of them, for example Rocky Horror Picture Show and Rent.

The thing that is almost universally true, however, is that a live performance will almost always put a filmed performance in its place. The energy of a live performance, complete with its high points and its occasional blemishes is unmatchable by the canned performance that a movie presents.

I was also reminded of all the wonderful musicals that I had somehow never managed to see, either on the stage or screen. Shows like Cats, Miss Saigon, and Avenue Q. I hope they will be revived by touring companies so that I can catch up on some of them.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

I am reading a book entitled Imager by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. It is the first book in a series of ten books so far. The premise is that there are certain people in this fantasy world that can manifest things just by thinking about them. It is a wonderful story so far (I’m about a third of the way into the first book). It has gotten me to think about some parallels between the Imagers in that world and programmers in ours.

What does a programmer do if not bring forth a creation solely from his or her mind. And it is more than just a story, although I shudder when I say just a story considering how much I have struggled writing fiction myself. My point though is that programs often have a utilitarian function. They enable us to do things that we couldn’t do without them. Never mind that a program doesn’t have a physical existence, per se. One that can be seen and touched. But it does have perceptible effects upon the world, whether it is on a display screen or in some physical process that it controls through a digital interface.

In the books, Imagurs walked a fine line between being useful to those that didn’t share their gift, and being killed out of fear of what they might do with their awesome talents. Although people don’t fear software developers now, I can see a not so distant future in which they do. And with fear comes persecution.

We need to start teaching our apprentice programmers a code of ethics and holding them to it. If people don’t trust programmers, we stand to face problems over that mistrust, sooner than later. When people realize the power that programmers wield in today’s digital world we better be prepare to allay their fears.

By the way, I highly recommend the book. It is riveting. I’m already looking forward to getting the next volume in the series.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

I signed up for the test drive of brain.fm. It is a web site that purports to help you focus, meditate, or sleep via music tailored to effect your brain state. I of course signed up for focus. I have often complained that I was having trouble concentrating when I was trying to write, either my morning journal entry or my blog post. I have to report that since I started listening to it right before I started writing this blog post, I have managed to focus on writing it, despite the show on the television. I am wearing headphones.

The music is what might be termed high energy space music, where space music refers to the kind of music played on Hearts of Space. There is a kind of a warble that underlies the somewhat arbitrary melody and driving rhythm. I quite like it. It is varied enough to be interesting without being so complex to distract. I think they’ve accomplished their goal here. I am curious about the meditation track and the sleep induction track.

In the mean time since I am so focused, I intend to take advantage of my state of mind to write a little bit longer post. It will be entirely impromptu due to the fact that I didn’t give it any thought prior to starting to write. To tell the truth, most of my blog posts are written this way. I have some vague idea and I start to riff on it. If I generate questions to which I don’t off the top of my head know the answer, I stop and look them up.

Lately though, I’ve been somewhat agitated and I haven’t followed up with research as much as I would like. It was all I could do just to throw the ideas out there without expending the effort to look up the specific details or studies to support my assertions. This bothered me, but not enough that I did anything about it.

I have studied so called entrainment in the past. The idea is that the brain produces electromagnetic waves at specific frequencies that have been correlated with the subject’s state of mind. The categories of brain waves have been given names from the Greek alphabet, for instance alpha waves, beta waves, delta waves, and theta waves. Each group corresponds to a state of mind.

Studies have been done that indicate that musical content can nudge the brain into one or another of these states. It has been compared to the phenomena where two electronic signals are of nearly the same frequency and one is held rigidly steadfast, the other will drift toward it until they are in unison. This is termed entrainment. I believe this is probably behind the music at brain.fm.

So, I just took a break and went and read on the brain.fm web site about the the science behind their product. It is in fact based on the entrainment research. I think I’m going to give it a try. I would like to be able to get more done when I’m working, sleep more effectively when I’m sleeping, and meditate better when I am meditating. I am not sure about the $150 lifetime program yet but I think $48 for a year is not unreasonable. If I renew my subscription in a year, I may opt for the lifetime plan.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Changing one’s sleep habits is a bitch, not to put too fine a point on it. I recently changed assignments at work and my new group tends to work from approximately 7:30am until around 4:00pm. I’m not required to work those hours but in the spirit of being a team player, I have been working on shifting my circadian rhythm.

I have been getting up early for several years now. I spend the time getting bathed and dressed, doing chores around the house, talking with my wife, taking my dogs for their morning walk, and writing a thousand words in my journal. In order to get all that in and get to the office around 9:00am, I was getting up at 5:30am.

In order to attempt to get to work around 8:00am, I have started getting up at 4:30am. But things aren’t that simple. Getting up an hour earlier means getting to bed an hour earlier, unless I intend to subsist on an hour less sleep a night. I soon discovered that I can’t do with an hour less sleep. Furthermore, I discovered that when I get up at 4:30am, even if I go to bed at 9:00pm instead of 10:00pm, I am not as alert as I am at 5:30am.

This makes it more difficult for me to write in my journal. I find myself nodding off while I’m trying to write. And when I am managing to stay awake, my thought processes aren’t as lively as they are when I get up at 5:30am. This has been slowly improving but I still find myself tired in the morning, tired in the evening when I’m trying to write my blog post, and even tired mid afternoon, around 3:00pm.

I also find that I’m struggling to get anything else done besides my bare minimum routine. I expect it will continue to get better as I keep practicing and my circadian rhythm slowly shifts. Of course when we spring forward, I’ll have to go through this process all over again. I hope everyone gets a good night sleep and wakes up refreshed. I’m certainly going to give it my best try.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

When I was in high school Alvin Toffler published a book entitled Future Shock. In it he described a condition that resulted from too much change too fast. The fact is, the amount of and acceleration in the rate of change has continued to grow in the fifty years since Toffler did his study. Future shock has become more and more acute.

Ray Kurzweil studied the rate of change in his book The Singularity is Near. It turns out that no matter which dimension of technological change you measure they all are growing at an exponential rate. If you plot an exponential curve you discover that it goes up at an ever increasing rate until it reaches the point where it spikes to infinity.

Unless something constrains it from continuing to grow at that rate. Like for instance the laws of physics. Or, in the case of social and economic change, the ability of human beings to adapt to change. For millennia the fundamental rate of change that people had to deal with was measured in centuries for the most part.

And the number of things that were changing was few at any one time. You had one or two innovators per generation. Today we have thousands of innovators in any given field of endeavor. Add to that instant access to all that technical knowledge on the internet and we’re in for a hell of a roller coaster ride.

We went from an industrial based economy, to a service based economy, and most recently to an information based economy. We have enough resources that everyone in the world could live like royalty but instead we are at the mercy of the one percent that have concentrated control of 99 percent of the wealth. Things look grim.

Except for one saving fact. This minority can only get away with what we let them get away with. We have to take an active role in electing representatives and senators that will put our interests first. We have to work together to become the change that we want to see.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

“Winter is coming.”

So goes the motto of the Stark house in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. I feel a great impending doom facing the world. I’m not sure what is going to happen or what indications have tipped me off. I hope to goodness that I am wrong. But just for argument’s sake, what if I’m right?

How much would it take to topple civilization? The bulk of the population is dependent on a fragile infrastructure for clean water, food, and power. We have seen what a short disruption in power can do to our city. On April 27, 2011 a super outbreak of 362 tornadoes swept through Alabama doing nine billion dollars worth of damage and leaving Huntsville and much of North Alabama without power only to be slowly restored starting May first.

The affected area was relatively small. Many people were able to drive to Atlanta or Nashville or other unaffected places until power was restored. But what would happen if the entire country was affected? What if there was a coronal mass ejection that knocked out all electrical and electronic devices in the world? How long would it be before people were starving and rioting?

So, I’m feeling depressed tonight. I am wondering what I can do to help change the world into a less dangerous place. A place that is less prone to slide into barbarism at the stroke of disaster, natural or man made. I hope we never find out first hand the answer to any of these ominous questions.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

My father was a school teacher. He taught English and Speech and Theater. He was a good teacher. He was a consummate professional. But the thing that made his soul sing was directing theatrical productions. When he was in college his plan was to prepare himself for a career in New York on Broadway. He tailored his degree so that he would have the credentials necessary to obtain a teaching certificate.

When he graduated from college, he gave his degree to his father and told him “There you go.” He had gotten the teaching degree to show his father that he could do it. He was drafted soon after that and sent to post Korean War Germany. He was assigned to headquarters company of a training battalion and ended up directing a touring special services variety show that played various American military installations in Europe.

When he got out of the Army, he returned to school studying for a masters degree in Theater. Only now he had a wife and baby boy. He found a position teaching in a High School in Waterloo, Illinois. The next year he took a job Junior High School in Springfield Illinois. After a couple of years there, he was offered a position at Paducah Tilghman High School in Paducah, Kentucky.

He had always done plays at the schools where he taught but Tilghman gave him the opportunity to mount high quality theatrical productions with a school population large enough to supply enough talented actors to pull it off. I remember He produced everything from Shakespeare to musicals. It was a magical time. It got into my blood.

When I was eight and nine, I was an extra in a summer stock musical titled “Stars In My Crown”. I played one of Job’s children in his production of Archibald MacCleish’s J.B. when I was in fourth grade. In sixth and seventh grade, a friend and I performed a one act play in several talent shows.

I was active in high school plays throughout my high school career. And then when I graduated from High School I got a job at Guntown Mountain in Cave City, Kentucky. I was a gunfighter and I played guitar in the saloon show. The next summer I did the same thing at Kaintuck Territory in Aurora, Kentucky near Kentucky Lake. The next summer I was back at Guntown Mountain for my last season in western theme parks.

It has been forty years since I have been a professional actor but it is still in my blood. I think I would love to do it again. I enjoy performing, whether it is playing the guitar of acting on the stage or in videos. Perhaps I should act upon this urge. My father found a way to integrate his dream into his professional life. Perhaps I can circle back to my theatrical origins.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.