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Human Sorting Algorithms Video

Chris Rebert — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:24:51 +0000

A while back in high school (Menlo School to be precise), myself and some other members of The Neighborhood (the math & comp sci club), suggested we try acting out the various sorting algorithms with humans and videotaping it. Unfortunately, we never were able to make the necessary arrangements to actually carry out the project, though I did write choreographic drafts for a couple of the sorts at one point.

However, this year during Knight School, some other Neighborhood members held a course on algorithms and managed to make the dream a reality. Here’s the terrific video on YouTube.

For what I can only assume were time constraints, Quicksort sadly is not shown(!). Neither is Heapsort, but that would be particularly hard to videotape given the necessary viewing angle to show the structure of the heap being made.

Anyway, congratulations to everyone in the “Algorithmic Thinking” Knight School class of 2009! Great job!

[EDIT: Also, I don't remember seeing that Obama clip before. That's pretty funny. I wonder who clued the Commander-in-Chief in...]

ALL CAPS Laws

Chris Rebert — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 23:05:08 +0000

My friend does email customer service for a computer company; I worked with him for while. When you work in customer service long enough, you see just how unreasonable people can get (and how little the average person knows about computers). In particular, both angry people and computer-illiterate people tend to use ALL CAPS in their messages, which makes them annoyingly hard to read. Today, my friend quoted to me a recent email from a stupid customer, which reminded me of all this and led me to coin:

Rebert’s Law of Internet Conversations:

Grammar quality and number of capitalized letters are inversely correlated in internet messages.

Not to be outdone, my friend quickly retorted with the more humorous:

Silver’s Corollary:

As the percentage of capital letters in a message approaches 1, the probability of the message making any f*cking sense whatsoever approaches 0.

I like his formulation better. ;)

Amateur Fiction FTW!

Chris Rebert — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 06:57:25 +0000

My friend recently started publishing a serialized short science fiction story on his group blog, and it’s terrific so far. It’s intriguingly titled “Cities of Bronze and Glass”. It’s about a “device” that seeks to find the mysterious “Creator”. In doing so, it buries itself only after making a backup of itself, which it names “Two”. This inevitably leads to a large population of devices (“Forty-Three” is mentioned at one point), all being backups and all trying to find “the Creator”. I don’t think I can adaquately summarize the typical SciFi atmosphere of mystery in it, suffice it to say that no further backstory is given, which is par for the course in Science Fiction. I highly encourage you to read it as it’s quite novel and original. My friend hasn’t finished it yet, so I eagerly await the upcoming parts in order to learn how the story ends.

If you like it, you might also enjoy a considerably longer story from the same blog: “Awakening“. I think my other friend ,the Illuminati Ninja, would appreciate that story, especially considering the vague similarity to his story which was took place on a Pan-Dimensional Waffle, among other settings.

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