Addepar Ant AI & Blob-Bomb
Addepar requests that internship applicants program an ant AI in Java. This was my first experience programming an AI, so I stuck with classic techniques like state machines and A* pathfinding to be sure I ended up with something functional. In this article, I’ll be documenting the challenge, my strategy, and possible improvements. I’ll also …
jQuery Load SlideToggle Jumping
When I began blogging, I envisioned that the majority of my posts would be similar to this one – documenting interesting quirks and bug fixes. Of course, nearly every quirk or fix I’ve come across has already been documented on various blogs across the internet – until now! The Problem When working on the …
2D Multigrid & Red-Black SOR in Ada95… Part 3
Now for the epic conclusion to my 3 part series on Successive Over Relaxation and Multigrid PDE solving methods. If that last sentence didn’t make sense to you, please refresh your memory by skimming parts one & two. The Multigrid Algorithm In our main function, we start by kicking off n tasks (Ada’s version …
The Pleasure of Finding Tricks Out
I’ve been thinking about what I want to do after I graduate from college (not an uncommon thought). I don’t know if I want to pursue my Masters, develop mobile software, work in high performance computing, or find a niche in something else. All of these fields are super interesting, but not one is fascinating. …
New Year’s Report
With 2012 and my final year of undergraduate studies beginning, I thought it would be a good time to gauge my programming progress this year. I’ll be rating myself using Sijin Joseph’s programmer competency matrix. Next year, I’ll look back on this post and see how and where I’ve improved. Programmer Competency Matrix Computer …
Taxonomic Tree Visualization and Nested List Parsing
I’m currently employed by WWU’s biology department to develop a web application that catalogues over 1000 moth species native to the Pacific Northwest region. With so many species, the taxonomic tree is large and not readily displayable on the web. Coming up with an intuitive user interface for navigating the tree is proving to be …
2D Multigrid & Red-Black SOR in Ada95… Part 2
Before we begin the next part in this series, let’s review the stencil used for solving the heat equation. A single iteration over the grid involves applying this stencil (taking the NEWS (North/East/West/South average) for every index in the inner grid. Let’s see how this looks sequentially in Python. This is known as Jacobi iteration …
2D Multigrid & Red-Black SOR in Ada95… Part 1
Grid computations are commonly used in the scientific community to model a variety of physical systems. These systems are modeled by approximating the solutions to the partial differential equations that describe the phenomena that is being studied. In this series of posts, I’ll be focusing on a solver I wrote for elliptic PDE’s like Laplace’s …
3D Fruchterman Reingold Algorithm?
In preparation for SC11, I began experimenting with parallelism using something other than the built in paradigms in the Ada programming language. Unfortunately, it’s not so easy to pick a programming model – popular models include OpenMP, OpenMPI, OpenCL, CUDA, Intel Cilk, and pthreads (among others!). I might do a blog post in the future …
Intel’s Parallel Resources for Students
Over the summer of 2011, I had the chance to meet a couple of Intel employees and discuss, for the first time, Intel’s “Many Integrated Core” technology for High Performance Computing, it’s applications, and what programmer’s would have to do to take advantage of the new hardware. Not only that, I got to hold one …