A while back Peter Norvig posted a wonderful pair of articles about regex golf. The idea behind regex golf is to come up with the shortest possible regular expression that matches one given list of strings, but not the other. “Regex Golf,” by Randall Munroe. In the first article, Norvig runs a basic algorithm to recreate and improve the results from the comic, and in the second he beefs it up with some improved search heuristics.

I have a little secret: I don’t like the terminology, notation, and style of writing in statistics. I find it unnecessarily complicated. This shows up when trying to read about Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. Take, for example, the abstract to the Markov Chain Monte Carlo article in the Encyclopedia of Biostatistics. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a technique for estimating by simulation the expectation of a statistic in a complex model.

Last time we defined the Hamming code. We also saw that it meets the Hamming bound, which is a measure of how densely a code can be packed inside an ambient space and still maintain a given distance. This time we’ll define the Reed-Solomon code which optimizes a different bound called the Singleton bound, and then generalize them to a larger class of codes called Reed-Muller codes.

Problem: Given a massive data stream of $ n$ values in $ \{ 1, 2, \dots, m \}$ and the guarantee that one value occurs more than $ n/2$ times in the stream, determine exactly which value does so. Solution: (in Python) def majority(stream): held = next(stream) counter = 1 for item in stream: if item == held: counter += 1 elif counter == 0: held = item counter = 1 else: counter -= 1 return held Discussion: Let’s prove correctness.

Or how to detect and correct errors Last time we made a quick tour through the main theorems of Claude Shannon, which essentially solved the following two problems about communicating over a digital channel. What is the best encoding for information when you are guaranteed that your communication channel is error free? Are there any encoding schemes that can recover from random noise introduced during transmission?

There are two basic problems in information theory that are very easy to explain. Two people, Alice and Bob, want to communicate over a digital channel over some long period of time, and they know the probability that certain messages will be sent ahead of time. For example, English language sentences are more likely than gibberish, and “Hi” is much more likely than “asphyxiation.” The problems are: Say communication is very expensive.

Last time we saw a number of properties of graphs, such as connectivity, where the probability that an Erdős–Rényi random graph $ G(n,p)$ satisfies the property is asymptotically either zero or one.

Last time we left off with a tantalizing conjecture: a random graph with edge probability $ p = 5/n$ is almost surely a connected graph. We arrived at that conjecture from some ad-hoc data analysis, so let’s go back and treat it with some more rigorous mathematical techniques.

Last time we left off with the tantalizing question: how do you do a quantum “AND” operation on two qubits? In this post we’ll see why the tensor product is the natural mathematical way to represent the joint state of multiple qubits. Then we’ll define some basic quantum gates, and present the definition of a quantum circuit.

The best place to start our journey through quantum computing is to recall how classical computing works and try to extend it. Since our final quantum computing model will be a circuit model, we should informally discuss circuits first. A circuit has three parts: the “inputs,” which are bits (either zero or one); the “gates,” which represent the lowest-level computations we perform on bits;

Quantum mechanics is one of the leading scientific theories describing the rules that govern the universe. It’s discovery and formulation was one of the most important revolutions in the history of mankind, contributing in no small part to the invention of the transistor and the laser. Here at Math ∩ Programming we don’t put too much emphasis on physics or engineering, so it might seem curious to study quantum physics.