In last week’s post, I pulled data about local restaurants from Yelp to generate a dataset. I was happy to find that Yelp actually has a very friendly API. This guide will walk you through setting up some boiler plate…
N-Queens Part 2: More Algorithms
Last time we were considering the following n-queens board with a current heuristic cost of 5:By making just one move, the best decision would be to move the second queen to the space marked 2. However, to find that move,…
N-Queens Part 1: Steepest Hill Climbing
The n-queens problem was first invented in the mid 1800s as a puzzle for people to solve in their spare time, but now serves as a good tool for discussing computer search algorithms. In chess, a queen is the only…
Finding the colors used in graffiti through clustering
Earlier this week, a Graffiti “museum” of sorts in New York was destroyed. Graffiti artists from around the world came to contribute to the ever-changing murals at 5Pointz. To combine millions of colors into just 32 obviously removes a lot…
Review: Udacity Web Development (CS253)
When web applications started to become popular, a big selling point was that you could design one set of code and have it run on any internet-capable computer. Unfortunately the front-end of the internet is now so fragmented that this…