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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  5d ago (text post)   231 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for March 25, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Update on this:

@lagrangian and I discussed this over PM, and he introduced me to the wonderful concept of memoisation, which took the difficulty from exponential to quadratic. So, stuff that would have taken weeks (or millennia) now takes minutes, and I turned this into this in a couple of weeks (most of that being me moving data around and doing formatting).

Hurrah! Go team!

Pedantry: I'd describe it more as dynamic programming, with memoization being a detail, and memoisation being a dirty British spelling.

I was already breaking it down into smaller problems; the part I was missing was memoisation to let me do all of those smaller problems only once instead of >9000 times. The algorithm we built would still run in exponential time if I took out the "@cache" on the key function, and if you'd told me memoisation was a thing I'd have probably managed it from there. Necessary and sufficient.

Also, uh, in case you weren't aware, I am Australian, so yes, I do use Commonwealth spelling.

Ah, in that case, I suggest turning the computer right side up to make it run faster.

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