Pug’s Place

Several topics to toss in tonight’s update, so I’ll go in order.

1. Chasing Jimbo Wales

A group I’m involved in here on campus (Florida Free Culture) has arranged and secured funding to bring Jimbo (Jimmy) Wales to UF on Wednesday, April 12 2006. Jimbo is the founder of Wikipedia (and the whole of Wikimedia’s offerings, actually). He’s The Man behind the open encyclopedia concept. Anyway, I’m helping in various small ways to make sure this thing happens. We’ve just kicked into super- ultra- mega- crazy organizing mode to do all of the invites, secure panelists for a panel about various free culture-ish topics to occur after Jimbo’s keynote speech, publicize and followup the event in a positive way.

This should end up being a really fun event. First, Jimbo will be giving a keynote about Wikipedia, research and higher education (among other things I’m sure). Then he’ll be sitting on a panel with four other persons addressing specifics about open access to research information, open file formats (instead of MS Word files, for example) among other topics. Hopefully it’ll attract plenty of influential people, and even some students.

Amusingly, it’s about 8 people (including E. and myself) who are managing this whole task.

2. New ‘Top Music’ list

Since I’ve somewhat stopped using IMMS my favorite music list was getting rather stale. I’ve changed it now to show the songs I’ve played the most in the last week. Might be more entertaining.

3. Programming Contests

The UF ACM Programming Team is hosting programming contests here this semester to get more explosure and generate more student interest. The first of these contests was last weekend – 10 students competed, what I’d call an excellent turnout for our first try. I assisted in judging, so I couldn’t win anything. We’re planning at least two more, one of which is rather large, is in 10 days and is being put together by a large amount of sweat from my brow.

On February 25th the University of Central Florida is driving three teams and support personnel here to compete against seven UF programming teams in a full-scale 5 hour programming contest. I’ve reserved a computer lab and a classroom, garnered support from my department’s chairman, purchased $300 in prizes, had guest accounts created for computer access, acquired money to purchase food and drinks for competitors and advertised, advertised, advertised. Amazingly, a quick count in the RSVP account shows that we are only one person shy of our effective maximum number of UF students. So it looks like from a turnout aspect we’ll be success full!

My team consists of myself, Tim Smith and Justin Michalczak. We are “Team gump/tion zebra”, an ‘in’ joke, referring to the third line of the sample input of one of the problems Tim wrote for last weekend’s contest.

Oh, and last night I judged the “First Annual Codeslingers Shootout” at the Gator Linux Users Group meeting. The problem was selected by the LUG organizer, Clint, and was the classic Game Show problem:

Monty shows you three curtains.

Behind two of the curtains there is a silly gag prize. Behind one of the curtains is a really nice prize (like a new car). The prizes are randomly distributed before each game. But, there is always one nice prize and two silly prizes. Monty asks you to pick one of the curtains. Monty then opens one of the curtains that has a silly gag prize behind it. The audience has a good laugh.

Then Monty turns to you and says, “I’ll give you a choice. You may stick with your original selection or you can switch doors right now.”

What should you do? There are 3 possible answers: One, keep your original selection. Two, switch. Or, three, it doesn’t matter.

Your program will show either by algorithm or simulation the one correct answer from these 3.

The winner was Eric Lavigne, “Fastest Codeslinger 2006″, who wrote a correct solution in 9 minutes in ~12 lines of CLISP. I wrote two reference solutions in 15 minutes before the contest in both C++ and Java and they’re here, if you’re interested: [Java, C++]. Amusingly (and not at all obviously), the solution is to always switch doors. See basically, when you select one of the doors in the beginning you have a 1/3 chance of getting the grand prize. Then a door is removed, but your original selection still has a 1/3 chance of being right. The probability of your first choice does not improve. Which means that the remaining door has a 2/3 chance of being right. Since 2/3 > 1/3, you should always change doors.Edit: Correct fraction size. 1/3+1/2 did not = 1. Was tired, sorry.

People can debate this solution for hours because it does totally fly in the face of common sense, but programatically you can simulate (or calculate) exactly what happens to the probabilities and see that yes, you should always switch.

4. Class Notes

I noticed something which amused me today. Let me frame it in the form of a question: Those of you taking classes now, how many pages of notes have you taken for your courses so far this semester?

At present, 1.5 months into a 4 month term, I’ve taken the following volume of notes:

• Distributed Operating Systems: 3 lines, one of which is the name of the course (misspelled as “Distributed Oberoning Systems”
• Concurrent Programming: 2.2 pages, front and back
• Networking Security: 1 page, front and back

Now, I do write very small, but still… I realized today that I don’t kill nearly as many trees as the majority of the people in my classes. Yet I still learn the material. At some point in the last four years I figured out that no matter how detailed I make my notes, I never go back and re-read them so, well, why take heavy notes?

Anyway, I’d love to be amused by your experiences / utter hatred. Flame on.

5. Other news

James and I bought Sunkist last weekend. I’m sipping at one now. Orange soda is so underrated.

In addition to all of this, I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (which I recieved at the end of January) and occasionally doing homework. I know, I should be working on Gpremacy. I will soon, I will…