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I add book recommendations to my GoodReads – To-read list. Then I sort by rating and pick the first one I like to read. In 2023, I’m reshaping my environment. Picking books I usually won’t pick. (Read The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted if you want to be similarly inspired.) So here are 4 approaches I’m adding to my process. Algorithmic. Sort Kaggle books based on popularity, rating, and age. Pick the top 10 (or 50) Serendipitous. Go to bookstores and libraries. Pick the most popular books Award-winning. Pick from the Pulitzer, Booker, Nobel, Hugo, and other award winners Challenges. Pick from Popsugar, Book Riot, Goodreads, The 52 Book Club, and other challenges FYI, here are algorithmic results (for books with 100+ ratings and a 4+ average on Goodreads): ...

Peter Norvig’s brilliant talk on Managing the Data Deluge. Among other things, he talks about how having lots of data is sometimes better than having a carefully designed algorithm.

The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4 by Donald Knuth. Pre-fascicles are available for download.

It’s a good time to be a mathematician.

Compare Yahoo and Google searches. This site lets you compare the rankings of each site on identical searches with Yahoo and Google.

An update on the IIT-K prime factorisation algorithm. via Matthai Markose

Tetris is NP-Hard. Let me explain, in English, what that means. The toughness of problems is how much time it takes to solve them. Adding two 3-digit number takes less time than adding two 30-digit numbers, and hence is easier. Similarly, figuring out if a 3-digit number is prime or not is easier than a 30-digit number. Some problems grow tough very quickly. Adding two 30-digit numbers is 10-times slower than adding two 3-digit numbers. But checking if a 30-digit number is prime is several trillions of times slower than checking a 3-digit number. That is because, to check if a number is prime, you need to repeatedly divide it by numbers smaller than it. For a 3-digit number, you need to divide by around 1,000 numbers. For a 30 digit number, it’s several trillions. ...

“Write a one-line C expression to determine if a number is a power of 2”. Microsoft is famous for asking such questions to their programmers. Or you might want to find out what the assembly code CWD XOR AX, DX SUB AX, DX does. Satish’s site has the answer, but not the question. More questions: 1 2