Now on ScienceBlogs: And so, driven on ceaselessly toward new shores
Finding the fun in good math; Shredding bad math and squashing the crackpots who espouse it.
Mark Chu-Carroll (aka MarkCC) is a PhD Computer Scientist, who works for Google as a Software Engineer. My professional interests center on programming languages and tools, and how to improve the languages and tools that are used for building complex software systems.
Category: Graph Theory
Suppose you've got a huge graph - millions of nodes. And you know that it's not connected - so the graph actually consists of some number of pieces (called the connected components of the graph). And there are constantly...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 11:40 AM • 12 Comments •
Category: Computational Complexity
There are a lot of very cool problems in computer science that can be solved by using an appropriate data structure; and the data structures are often easiest to describe in terms of graphs. And of those data structures,...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 8:53 PM • 14 Comments •
Category: Basics
For the basics, I wrote a bunch of stuff about sorting. It seems worth taking a moment to talk about something related: binary search. Binary search is one of the most important and fundamental algorithms, and it shows up...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 12:08 PM • 14 Comments •
Category: Basics
Multiple people have written to me, after seeing yesterday's algorithms basics post, asking me to say more about sorting algorithms. I have to say that it's not my favorite topic - sorting is one of those old bugaboos that...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 3:30 PM • 51 Comments •
Category: Computational Complexity
What started me on this whole complexity theory series was a question in the comments about the difference between quantum computers and classical computers. Taking the broadest possible view, in theory, a quantum computer is a kind of non-deterministic...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 11:08 AM • 19 Comments •
Category: Computational Complexity
As I've mentioned in the past, complexity theory isn't really one of my favorite topics. As a professional computer scientist, knowing and loving complexity up to the level of NP-completeness is practically a requirement. But once you start to...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 4:16 PM • 31 Comments •
Category: Computational Complexity
Now that we've gone through a very basic introduction to computational complexity, we're ready to take a high-level glimpse at some of the more interesting things that arise from it. The one that you'll hear about most often is...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 3:45 PM • 33 Comments •
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