I want to be able to introduce new 'tag lines' into a database that are shown 'randomly' to users. (These tag lines are shown as an introduction as animated text.) Based upon the number of sales that result from those taglines I'd like the good ones to trickle to the top, but still show the others less frequently. I could come up with ...
This is a problem I've had on my mind for a long time. Being the son of a teacher and a programmer, it occurred to me early on... but I still haven't found a solution for it. So this is the problem. One needs to create a time schedule for a school, using some constraints. These are generally divided in two categories: Sanity Checks ...
What is an NP-complete problem? Why is it such an important topic in computer science? ...
How do I get the inverse of a matrix in python? I've implemented it myself, but it's pure python, and I suspect there are faster modules out there to do it. ...
If you were a programming teacher and you had to choose one sorting algorithm to teach your students which one would it be? I am asking for only one because I just want to introduce the concept of sorting. Should it be the bubble sort or the selection sort? I have noticed that these two are taught most often. Is there another type of sor...
I'm trying to find an efficient C++ interval tree implementation (mostly likely based on red black trees) without a viral or restrictive license. Any pointers to a clean lightweight standalone implementation? For the use case I have in mind, the set of intervals is known at the outset (there would be say a million) and I want to be able ...
I'm looking at the code for a phase accumulator, and I must be a simpleton because I don't get it. The code is simple enough: Every Clock Tick do: accum = accum + NCO_param; return accum; accum is a 32-bit register. Obviously, at some point it will roll-over. My question really is: How does this relate to the phase? ...
What is the most memory efficient way to search within a string in ANSI C? (put the code up) An example where this is needed is in embedded devices that are very short on available memory but nowadays have reasonable clock cycles. ...
I am building a web application using .NET 3.5 (ASP.NET, SQL Server, C#, WCF, WF, etc) and I have run into a major design dilemma. This is a uni project btw, but it is 100% up to me what I develop. I need to design a system whereby I can take an image and automatically crop a certain object within it, without user input. So for example,...
With one worker, who can only perform one task at a time (but can switch between tasks instantly) Given a list of tasks, -- defined as "n seconds, every m seconds" (eg, 5 seconds every 3600 seconds) How could I find the best starting times and count for each task? If every task were "1 second, every 60 seconds", each would have an uni...
Note This is not a REBOL-specific question. You can answer it in any language. Background The REBOL language supports the creation of domain-specific languages known as "dialects" in REBOL parlance. I've created such a dialect for list comprehensions, which aren't natively supported in REBOL. A good cartesian product algorithm is nee...
Here are the requirements: Must be alphanumeric, 8-10 characters so that it is user friendly. These will be stored as unique keys in database. I am using Guids as primary keys so an option to use GUids to generate these unique Ids would be preferable. I am thinking on the lines of a base-n converter that takes a Guid and converts to an...
I am using pseudo-code here, but this is in JavaScript. With the most efficient algorithm possible I am trying to find the high and low given an array of positive whole numbers. This is what I came up with, but I don't think it is probably best, and was just wondering if anyone has any other suggestions. var low = 1; var high = 1; for (...
We are all talking about the efficiency of the algorithms and it depends on input size -basically. How about the system specifications of current computer that runs the algorithm? does it make any difference to run a different sorting algorithm in a Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHZ, 4 GB RAM-computer or in a P-2, 256 MB RAM-computer? I am sure that ...
What deterministic garbage collection algorithms are out there? By deterministic I vaguely mean that can be used in critical real-time software like aerospace flight software. Garbage collectors (and dynamic memory allocation for that matter) are big no-no's in flight software because they are considered non-deterministic. However, I k...
Working through some programming interview challenges I found online, I had to write an algorithm to reverse a const char * and return a pointer to a new char *. I think I have it, but to make it work properly I had to do some wonky stuff - basically having to account for the null-terminating character myself. Somehow I feel this is wron...
Which sort algorithm works best on mostly sorted data? ...
I'm working on a project where I need to analyze a page of text and collections of pages of text to determine dominant words. I'd like to know if there is a library (prefer c# or java) that will handle the heavy lifting for me. If not, is there an algorithm or multiple that would achieve my goals below. What I want to do is similar...
I want to convert from char representing a hexadecimal value (in upper or lower case) to byte, like '0'->0, '1' -> 1, 'A' -> 10, 'a' -> 10, 'f' -> 15 etc... I will be calling this method extremely often, so performance is important. Is there a faster way than to use a pre-initialized HashMap<Character,Byte> to get the value from? Ans...
I have a sea of weighted nodes with edges linking clusters of nodes together. This graph follows the typical small world layout. I wish to find a path finding algorithm, which isn't costly on processor power, to find a path along the best possible path where the nodes are the most favorably weighted, the fastest route is not the most im...