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Algorithmic Puzzles
''Algorithmic Puzzles'' is a book of puzzles based on computational thinking. It was written by computer scientists Anany and Maria Levitin, and published in 2011 by Oxford University Press. Topics The book begins with a "tutorial" introducing classical algorithm design techniques including backtracking, divide-and-conquer algorithms, and dynamic programming, methods for the analysis of algorithms, and their application in example puzzles. The puzzles themselves are grouped into three sets of 50 puzzles, in increasing order of difficulty. A final two chapters provide brief hints and more detailed solutions to the puzzles, with the solutions forming the majority of pages of the book. Some of the puzzles are well known classics, some are variations of known puzzles making them more algorithmic, and some are new. They include: *Puzzles involving chessboards, including the eight queens puzzle, knight's tours, and the mutilated chessboard problem * Balance puzzles * River crossing p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books by decree in 1586. It is the second-oldest university press after Cambridge University Press, which was founded in 1534. It is a department of the University of Oxford. It is governed by a group of 15 academics, the Delegates of the Press, appointed by the Vice Chancellor, vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford. The Delegates of the Press are led by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as OUP's chief executive and as its major representative on other university bodies. Oxford University Press has had a similar governance structure since the 17th century. The press is located on Walton Street, Oxford, Walton Street, Oxford, opposite Somerville College, Oxford, Somerville College, in the inner suburb of Jericho, Oxford, Jericho. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
River Crossing Puzzle
A river crossing puzzle is a type of puzzle in which the object is to carry items from one river bank to another, usually in the fewest trips. The difficulty of the puzzle may arise from restrictions on which or how many items can be transported at the same time, or which or how many items may be safely left together.. The setting may vary cosmetically, for example, by replacing the river by a bridge. The earliest known river-crossing problems occur in the manuscript ''Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes'' (), traditionally said to be written by Alcuin. The earliest copies of this manuscript date from the 9th century; it contains three river-crossing problems, including the fox, goose, and bag of beans puzzle and the jealous husbands problem. Well-known river-crossing puzzles include: * The fox, goose, and bag of beans puzzle, in which a farmer must transport a fox, goose and bag of beans from one side of a river to another using a boat which can only hold one item in additi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Puzzle Books
A puzzle is a game, Problem solving, problem, or toy that tests a person's ingenuity or knowledge. In a puzzle, the solver is expected to put pieces together (Disentanglement puzzle, or take them apart) in a logical way, in order to find the solution of the puzzle. There are different genres of puzzles, such as Crosswords, crossword puzzles, word-search puzzles, number puzzles, relational puzzles, and logic puzzles. The academic study of puzzles is called enigmatology. Puzzles are often created to be a form of entertainment but they can also arise from serious Mathematical problem, mathematical or logical problems. In such cases, their solution may be a significant contribution to mathematical research. Etymology The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' dates the word ''puzzle'' (as a verb) to the 16th century. Its earliest use documented in the ''OED'' was in a book titled ''The Voyage of Robert Dudley (explorer), Robert Dudley...to the West Indies, 1594–95, narrated by Capt. Wyatt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Algorithms
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing calculations and data processing. More advanced algorithms can use conditionals to divert the code execution through various routes (referred to as automated decision-making) and deduce valid inferences (referred to as automated reasoning). In contrast, a heuristic is an approach to solving problems without well-defined correct or optimal results.David A. Grossman, Ophir Frieder, ''Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Heuristics'', 2nd edition, 2004, For example, although social media recommender systems are commonly called "algorithms", they actually rely on heuristics as there is no truly "correct" recommendation. As an effective method, an algorithm can be expressed within a finite amount of space and time"Any classic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Gasarch
William Ian Gasarch ( ; born 1959) is an American computer scientist known for his work in computational complexity theory, computability theory, computational learning theory, and Ramsey theory. He is currently a professor at the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science with an affiliate appointment in Mathematics. Gasarch is a frequent mentor of high school student research projects; one of these, with Jacob Lurie, won the 1996 Westinghouse Science Talent Search for Lurie. He has co-blogged on computational complexity with Lance Fortnow since 2007. He was book review editor for ACM SIGACT NEWS from 1997 to 2015. Education Gasarch received his doctorate in computer science from Harvard in 1985, advised by Harry R. Lewis. His thesis was titled ''Recursion-Theoretic Techniques in Complexity Theory and Combinatorics''. He was hired into a tenure track professorial job at the University of Maryland in the Fall of 1985. He was promoted to associate professor with tenu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manhattan Distance
Taxicab geometry or Manhattan geometry is geometry where the familiar Euclidean distance is ignored, and the distance between two point (geometry), points is instead defined to be the sum of the absolute differences of their respective Cartesian coordinates, a distance function (or Metric (mathematics), metric) called the ''taxicab distance'', ''Manhattan distance'', or ''city block distance''. The name refers to the island of Manhattan, or generically any planned city with a rectangular grid of streets, in which a taxicab can only travel along grid directions. In taxicab geometry, the distance between any two points equals the length of their shortest grid path. This different definition of distance also leads to a different definition of the length of a curve, for which a line segment between any two points has the same length as a grid path between those points rather than its Euclidean length. The taxicab distance is also sometimes known as ''rectilinear distance'' or distanc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geometric Median
In geometry, the geometric median of a discrete point set in a Euclidean space is the point minimizing the sum of distances to the sample points. This generalizes the median, which has the property of minimizing the sum of distances or absolute differences for one-dimensional data. It is also known as the spatial median, Euclidean minisum point, Torricelli point, or 1-median. It provides a measure of central tendency in higher dimensions and it is a standard problem in facility location, i.e., locating a facility to minimize the cost of transportation. The geometric median is an important estimator of location in statistics, because it minimizes the sum of the ''L''2 distances of the samples. It is to be compared to the mean, which minimizes the sum of the ''squared'' ''L''2 distances; and to the coordinate-wise median which minimizes the sum of the ''L''1 distances. The more general ''k''-median problem asks for the location of ''k'' cluster centers minimizing the sum o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Streaming Algorithm
In computer science, streaming algorithms are algorithms for processing data streams in which the input is presented as a sequence of items and can be examined in only a few passes, typically one-pass algorithm, just one. These algorithms are designed to operate with limited memory, generally L (complexity), logarithmic in the size of the stream and/or in the maximum value in the stream, and may also have limited processing time per item. As a result of these constraints, streaming algorithms often produce approximate answers based on a summary or "sketch" of the data stream. History Though streaming algorithms had already been studied by Munro and Paterson as early as 1978, as well as Philippe Flajolet and G. Nigel Martin in 1982/83, the field of streaming algorithms was first formalized and popularized in a 1996 paper by Noga Alon, Yossi Matias, and Mario Szegedy. For this paper, the authors later won the Gödel Prize in 2005 "for their foundational contribution to streaming ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Balance Puzzle
A balance puzzle or weighing puzzle is a logic puzzle about balancing items—often coins—to determine which one has different weight than the rest, by using balance scales a limited number of times. The solution to the most common puzzle variants is summarized in the following table: For example, in detecting a dissimilar coin in three weighings (), the maximum number of coins that can be analyzed is . Note that with weighings and coins, it is not always possible to determine the nature of the last coin (whether it is heavier or lighter than the rest), but only that the other coins are all the same, implying that the last coin is the dissimilar coin. In general, with weighings, one can always determine the identity and nature of a single dissimilar coin if there are or fewer coins. In the case of three weighings, it is possible to find and describe a single dissimilar coin among a collection of coins. This twelve-coin version of the problem appeared in print as early a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
