Beyond speed: Measuring engineering success by impact, not velocity
If velocity is just a tool and not a goal, how do you measure real success for engineering teams?
Read moreFormulating eight queens as a SAT problem
The Boolean satisfiability problem is to determine whether there is a way to assign values to variables in a set of Boolean formulas to make the formulas hold [1]. If there is a solution, the next task would be to enumerate the solutions. You can solve the famous eight queens
Read moreSpecial solutions to the eight queens problem
There are 92 ways to place eight queens on a chessboard so that no queen is attacking any other. These fall into 12 equivalence classes. The 92 solutions are all rotations and reflections of these 12 basic solutions. If you think about the previous numbers a minute, you might wonder
Read moreThe non-attacking bishops problem
How many bishops can you place on a chessboard so that no bishop is attacking any other bishop? For a standard 8 × 8 chessboard the answer is 14. In general, for an n × n chessboard the answer is 2n − 2. Here’s one way to place the maximum
Read moreSorting Roman numerals
This morning I wrote about the frequencies of names for popes and kings. This involved sorting strings with Roman numerals since it’s common for popes and kings to have Roman numerals after their names. Something that surprised me was that sorting Roman numerals alphabetically roughly sorts them in numerical order,
Read moreFrequency of names of English monarchs
After I wrote the code to make the bar graph of papal names for the previous post, I decided to reuse the code to make a similar graph for monarchs of England. Just as there is some complication in counting papal names, there are even more complications in counting names
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