Okay, so mathematicians are awesome, and I wish I was one. Also, they do lots of different things - some of them work with numbers, others with linear transformations, others with partial orders, manifolds, permutations, braids, categories, sheaves, all kinds of things. One of the side fields (kind of a backwater, really) is mathematical logic, ( Read more... )

One of the first things that you need to do if you want to learn to program is to look at the connections between syntax and trees and nested parentheses and semantics. We speak to one another (and write to one another) so fluently that it's not obvious that natural language is in some important sense tree-shaped. Someone who has never studied ( Read more... )

In some games, prominantly collectible card games like M:tG ( Read more... )

Okay, let's assume that we understand the difference between an inferred utility function (e.g. such and such robot in fact destroys blue things therefore its utility function has a negative coefficient for 'blue things in the world'), and a utility function component in a system design (e.g. here is where the utility function is stored). We might ( Read more... )

There was a problem, and the microfeature that I was supposed to have done sometime last week turned out not to be working. So I investigated, and (re)figured out that the intended functionality was that message would be received at a particular class, but that method was polymorphically overridden by another method in a subclass, which delegated ( Read more... )

So memes, genes, and chain letters are a kind of thing, a message of some sort that may in the right host environment provoke a chain of events that yields more copies of that thing ( Read more... )

I made a decision. It wasn't a very important decision, it was in a game, and I made it somewhat thoughtlessly, but I want to analyze it in order to understand how to make decisions in general ( Read more... )

As you probably know, people frequently pay more for a product that they can hold, that they enjoy holding, than for a more "virtual" product. For example, Apple makes a lot of money selling physical objects such as iPads and iPhones and pays a lot of attention to the "feel" of the interaction - the swiping and so on. By contrast, products produced ( Read more... )

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Responsibility centers are an idea in management of corporations which might be relevant to software architecture ( Read more... )