April 28, 2013
by Alex
Comments Off on Code first, optimize later (but don’t forget to optimize!)
I am totally on board with the “code first, optimize later” school of programming. But sometimes one can forget to optimize, which can be a minor issue (if the code was already pretty optimized) or a major one (if there’s … Continue reading
November 20, 2012
by Alex
3 Comments
The news first: I’ve updated the Wikipedia Regex Search to include Wiktionary in its results. The Wikipedia results have also been updated to be current as of November 1st. Now the problem: to test it out, I attempted to solve … Continue reading
November 5, 2012
by Alex
Comments Off on Joon’s puzzler
Joon recently posted the following on Twitter: wordplay #puzzler: think of two unrelated phrases, both with enumeration 3, 4. the 3-letter words are synonyms; so are the 4-letter words. Well, I had just recently downloaded the unbelievably awesome natural language … Continue reading
April 13, 2012
by Alex
3 Comments
For more on this project, see the FillBot Jr. category As I mentioned in the comments of the last post, FillBot Jr. has successfully solved a crossword! Now admittedly, it was low-hanging fruit — a Monday Newsday by Gail Grabowski … Continue reading
April 9, 2012
by Alex
2 Comments
If you’re a regular on this blog, you may remember that I floated the idea of making a crossword-filling algorithm just to see how hard it would be. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get around to making it but today … Continue reading
March 25, 2012
by Alex
2 Comments
I’m sure most of my readers have heard of Dr. Fill, the Matt Ginsberg solving computer program that competed in this past ACPT. Now Matt is an artificial intelligence expert, so I’m sure Dr. Fill does about as well as … Continue reading
March 20, 2012
by Alex
Comments Off on Viewing your permissions on SQL Server
I wanted to see my permissions on SQL Server and Googling it was proving very hard. So I’m adding this here in case someone might find it useful. This will look at all the databases on the current server and … Continue reading
March 16, 2012
by Alex
Comments Off on Wiki Ranking II – Lessons for next time
All right, the new Wikipedia sort is live on CrosswordNexus.com and this time I am allowing users to download the original list to play with offline. Now that I’ve played with it a bit, I have some ideas for next … Continue reading
March 8, 2012
by Alex
9 Comments
The most interesting part of my Crossword Nexus website is the Wikipedia Regex search, and the most interesting part of that is the ordering of results. I didn’t want it to return results alphabetically — I wanted it to return … Continue reading
November 10, 2011
by Alex
3 Comments
When I was sick recently, my boss e-mailed me a math problem he said I might try to solve to pass the time. Now, I had thought that this was a problem he had read somewhere, but no: this is … Continue reading