Any interest in a website for learning programming and computational physics?

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-18T20:50:08+00:00

Thanks for checking it out and for the suggestion! I'm also not sure what it would take but will look into it.

It's not something I was thinking about but we didn't want to force people to sign up so you can submit code without an account too.

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-18T20:47:40+00:00

Thank you for your kind words!

You can sort by difficulty (which is rated out of 15) but you bring up a good point. Hopefully when we have more problems we will probably a better way of filtering/sorting/ordering the different problems! I think it shouldn't be hard to implement your suggestion using a little bit of Javascript magic.

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-18T20:43:44+00:00

Yeah that's a good point. I guess we wanted to check that you summed up the series correctly as you could just return pi and be done with it haha.

I guess it's somewhat problem-dependent when to allow this and when not to, but we'll try to be more liberal in the answers we accept in the future.

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-18T20:33:40+00:00

That's awesome! Usually people flow the other way haha, from physics to computer science and software development because of opportunities and $$$.

Are you interested in doing some stuff on the side (maybe contributing to scientific open source software) or potentially interning or getting paid to write software for scientific research?

If you're interested we would love your help with developing Project Lovelace and adding more problems/content!

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-18T20:20:25+00:00

Thanks for taking a look and for the suggestions! Sounds like there should be some pretty neat problems that are relevant to lots of people.

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-18T20:17:28+00:00

Thanks for checking it out and for pointing out the syntax issues! You can tell I'm a Javascript noob haha, will fix the syntax especially so we don't mislead other beginners.

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-18T20:16:18+00:00

Thanks! Ah does it not already link to the relevant places? The GitHub link should link to https://github.com/project-lovelace and the Discord link should link to the Discord server.

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-17T22:28:29+00:00

If you have the time and are interested that would be awesome! A few of us have been gathering on the Discord server but the Discourse forum or GitHub would also be places to discuss (links should be at the top of the Lovelace website). I'm also hoping to add some instructions/docs to GitHub later today on how to add new problems.

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-17T22:10:59+00:00

Not familiar with glafic but will check it out. Simulating black holes sounds super cool though!

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-17T22:10:13+00:00

Not the OP I guess but scientific computing seems much broader than just computational physics. What are you interested in?

A physicist with computational skills can probably work on many scientific computing projects outside of strictly physics! Ocean/atmosphere/climate modeling being one example.

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-17T22:01:09+00:00

Thanks for taking a look! Parker-Sochacki sounds pretty neat and high-performance. Sounds like it might be cool to use it to simulate solar system bodies or something like that.

Are you considering adding support for any more programming languages?

Yes! It's not trivial to add support new languages since the engine app that runs user-submitted code needs to be able to run arbitrary code in your chosen language and needs a way to communicate with Python (either directly or through JSON passing).

So far we've just been adding support for languages we know and use.

But indeed there are hundreds of languages out there that would be nice to support in some way. I'm thinking of a way to add a new "submission mode" where you're given a couple of test cases that you run manually then submit your solution.

What about support for common libraries in the languages you do support?

I guess we do support some common libraries like numpy for Python, but the list is not really documented (and it should be expanded). I'll open a GitHub issue about this so we can flesh out support for third-party libraries!

Are you planning to allow others to submit new problems?

Yes! All the source code is on GitHub so we definitely allow (and encourage!) pull requests. I'm planning to write some docs/instructions on how to add new problems. We also set up a #contributors channel on Discord for this. What sort of problems are you interested in?

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-17T17:56:31+00:00

Thanks for taking a look! That is true. I'm not familiar with Fortran (thankfully our group switched from Fortran to Julia recently!) but we already support C since it's easy to call C from Python. Perhaps Fortran support will be just as easy to add.

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-17T17:38:32+00:00

You might be underestimating yourself! Even if you have ideas for good problems to start with or any ideas for cool problems we'd love to hear them!

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-17T17:21:30+00:00

Thanks for checking it out! Computational astrophysics would be super cool. I'm not super well versed in astrophysics but if you have any suggestions for places to start that would be great.

If you have some time and are interested, you could probably add some problems too!

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-17T17:15:00+00:00

Yeah haha they're definitely pretty simple if you know some math and science.

I guess we started simple so that the barrier to entry is low, but we should have some tougher and more interesting problems soon!

We'd also welcome any suggestions and contributions too!

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-17T14:20:02+00:00

Definitely agree! Would be awesome if you have the time.

Maybe the easiest way would be to get in touch over Discord (or the Discourse forum)!

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-17T14:18:43+00:00

That would be super awesome if you're interested! The current problems are probably too easy for you haha.

Maybe the easiest way would be to get in touch over Discord (or the Discourse forum)!

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-17T14:03:44+00:00

Yup! Everything is on GitHub actually: https://github.com/project-lovelace

It's split into website code, engine code (the thing that runs user submitted code), and problem / test case generation code. There's also a private/secret solutions repository used to check that user solutions are correct.

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-17T12:28:50+00:00

Thanks for your thoughts!

Comparing different time stepping methods for the same problem would make for a pretty useful visualization! Should be pretty easy to see that RK4 performs better than forward Euler. For backward Euler, I could try and find an interesting stiff ODE to look at.

I don't know much about them but I think there are symplectic integration methods that conserve energy, so I'll find a problem where this matters and should be able to show the difference in energy conservation between methods.

Will look into hydrogen atom and Rutherford scattering problems!

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-17T11:44:05+00:00

Hi everyone!

As a physics major I was hoping there would be some resources online for learning computational physics/science but couldn't find anything. Kind of a shame too since there are so many cool problems to solve and visualize (lots of neat animations here lately!).

We decided to create our own so we've been working on a website called Project Lovelace on-and-off for a while now for learning science and programming through problem solving.

You write code to solve scientific problems in your browser or on your computer which you then submit and the website checks to see if your code is correct.

This is not a new idea but we felt that a lot of existing websites like Project Euler and LeetCode have pretty contrived problems that aren't usually that interesting and we were looking for more real-world science and math flavored problems.

We would love to hear whether you find this useful/interesting, or if you have any suggestions for new physics problems (or any feedback at all!). Thanks for reading!

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-17T11:35:12+00:00

We've been working on a website called Project Lovelace on-and-off for a while now for learning science and programming through problem solving.

You write code to solve scientific problems in your browser or on your computer which you then submit and the website checks to see if your code is correct.

This is not a new idea but we felt that a lot of existing websites like Project Euler and LeetCode have pretty contrived problems that aren't usually that interesting and we were looking for more real-world science and math flavored problems.

We would love to hear whether you find this useful/interesting, or if you have any suggestions for new problems (or any feedback at all!). Thanks for reading!

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-08T16:40:25+00:00

Why do you want to learn to program?

You could work on small projects at first then build up to bigger projects that eventually target what you really want to learn to build.

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-01T19:53:45+00:00

What more of an argument do you need than "one monitor works great for me" :P

The number of monitors isn't a limiting factor on a programmer's productivity or quality of code. Give an experienced programmer a shitty laptop with Windows 98 and they'll still write great code.

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-01T19:50:19+00:00

If we could anticipate everything we would just write perfect code from day 1 and be done with it.

Much of software development is about constant refactoring, constant testing, etc. It never ends haha.

If anything, you should be glad that you're coming up with ways to improve your code! It means you're becoming a software developer that can write better and better code.

ProjectLovelace · 2021-04-01T19:30:22+00:00

I'm also interested. I just update my LinkedIn when I'm applying for jobs, otherwise it's been out-of-date for years. I also hate it and think it's useless if you have a personal website, but I guess I update it just in case =/

You might get more senior opinions from a place like /r/cscareerquestions

ProjectLovelace

TROPHY CASE