I’ve recently been working on developing a novel statistical test to quantify sensitivity to the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP). The limiting factor has been the ability to efficiently generate arbitrarily shaped polygons on a lattice at random. In essence, this is needed to stochastically reallocate a spatial characteristic and measure variance.
Apparently, the exact solution I’m looking for is Donald Knuth’s algorithm X [0]. And I also found this interesting application of the algorithm [1].
I simply cannot express how much my curiosity has just peaked. Moreover, I now have reason to cite both Solomon Golomb and Donald Knuth in a paper.
If you try it out, please let me know what you think :)
P.S. work on that led to a sequence on the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences: https://oeis.org/A239658
However, I was reminded of seeing them in the teen novel Chasing Vermeer [0].
Knuth adjusted his algorithm X for ZDD and got some nice speedups.
It's not that I don't agree that he does it, it's just that moaning about it happens on nearly 100% of hackernews comment threads about his content, and it's generally much much less interesting than the usually very interesting content.
There’s a lot of interesting anecdotes/history here.
He spent quite a lot of time just talking about Golomb and his work.
Wolfram is slowly transforming into the Trump of computer science. Soon he'll cast turing machines as just a small precursor of himself having solved computation.
Isn't "needlessly" redundant there? :p
I've been called every name in the book by my own friends, e.g., Dunning-Kruger, "full of it", etc, etc. I know all these terms. I just don't know how to come across as a humble person, despite it hurting in my personal/social/work life. The only thing that helps is if I interact with others less (there I go again).
Argh! It's not triangulating, it's trilaterating.
Good article, though.
