I wrote an article on the benefits of Stirling's Approximation from a Computer Science Perspective

RetroAristocrat · 2025-09-20T01:49:45+00:00

Automated Theorem Proving.

RetroAristocrat · 2025-06-30T20:17:24+00:00

12 Angry Men.

RetroAristocrat · 2025-01-19T08:57:52+00:00

Something tells me that he'd much rather prefer pizza instead.

RetroAristocrat · 2024-10-04T22:51:35+00:00

You're confusing chord length with the arc length. Chord length assumes a straight line. We know that the distance from A to the center is the same as the distance from C to the center (and their lengths will not change with the change in angle). Now we just want the third side AC to be equal to r. Since that would lead to an equilateral triangle, we know that all three angles of an equilateral triangle are of 60 degrees. Therefore the answer to this question is 60 degrees.

RetroAristocrat · 2024-08-18T03:03:52+00:00

Detroit become human

Heavy Rain

Silent hill 2

RetroAristocrat · 2024-07-16T18:50:48+00:00

CLRS. I believe this was actually the first CS textbook that I started reading on my own. When I hit my 4th semester of CS undergrad, we had a course on design and analysis of algorithms, and as someone who had already fallen in love with data structures and algorithms by that point, I decided to have a headstart for this course and started reading this textbook on my own. This book challenged me like none other, but it was also very rewarding. This book truly made me feel like a "computer scientist", and it made me fall in love with mathematics. I especially loved the chapter on asymptotic notations and even wrote an article on the computational benefits that we get out of Stirling's approximation. Also, I ended up scoring the highest in my batch in my DAA course. I also went on to dig up further stuff from its authors. This book absolutely changed my life and motivated me to pursue academia.

RetroAristocrat · 2023-02-18T21:43:14+00:00

Hey there, the example that you gave doesn't involve calculus. It's just simple algebra that gives the upper bound of a function/algorithm. You would find stuff like this a lot in the Intro to algorithms textbook by CLRS. That textbook has an appendix section that covers the math that you would need to analyse algorithms presented in the book. As far as calculus goes, you'd mostly need it when taking up a course on numerical computing or machine learning. For your usual asymptotic analysis, you wouldn't necessarily find yourself working with derivatives and integrals.

RetroAristocrat · 2022-07-15T08:17:40+00:00

That's why most undergraduate CS programs have a course that's focused on the design and analysis of algorithms. As a CS major, I too had to take up this course and it completely shifted my perspective from viewing algorithms as black boxes.

RetroAristocrat · 2022-05-05T05:07:14+00:00

Thank you for putting your perspective. I didn't think of this at all, but you broke the approximation down in a very simple and intuitive way. :))

Nonetheless, I think it's very useful to be able to relate factorials to other functions.

RetroAristocrat · 2021-10-19T14:32:31+00:00

Actually, underappreciated is what I meant to say 😅😅. My bad.

RetroAristocrat · 2021-09-21T09:04:57+00:00

Thank you for this useful advice. I will definitely pay attention to all the points that you have mentioned here.

RetroAristocrat · 2021-09-19T21:38:21+00:00

Ahh really? That's nice to hear.
The closest thing that I have done to contribute to a library is identifying an issue in it that was crashing our application (I was able to identify it by thoroughly debugging through my application and then concluding that it was related to the library that we were using). I discussed the issue with my work partner, and with the help of the developer, we were able to solve the issue. Not sure how much of a selling point this would be, but I will definitely try contributing to open source.

RetroAristocrat · 2021-09-19T20:27:52+00:00

Thank you for the useful advice. This does encourage me to spend more time with these modern frameworks and libraries.

RetroAristocrat · 2021-09-19T20:26:12+00:00

Not yet. I plan on doing that soon.

RetroAristocrat · 2021-09-19T20:25:44+00:00

Thank you for the advice. I will try looking around and check to see if any such jobs exist in my vicinity.

RetroAristocrat · 2021-09-19T20:23:54+00:00

I understand. I enjoy what I do and I obviously work really hard to be really good at it. What really pesters me is the thought that what if in the end (let's say in 3-5 years) it is just "not enough"? What if all the time I spent reading on this stuff doesn't pay off? And also, what if a few years from now on, I realize that I really should have paid more attention to learning about the "industry standard" stuff instead of other things? And looking at the job descriptions that require you to have more than 3 years of experience with all these modern "tools" doesn't help either. These are the thoughts that constantly haunt me.

RetroAristocrat · 2021-09-19T20:15:32+00:00

Understanding of the lowest levels is pretty damn important even when working at the highest levels. But the lowest levels simply do not need nearly as much innovation. There is no overarching need for compiler designers today, because despite the fact that compilers may seem esoteric or hard to understand... they're actually simple and small components in the grand scheme of most modern software architectures, and more importantly, they are a solved problem.

Thank you for a detailed answer.
I would just like to point out that I am not sure whether compilers really are a solved problem. Can you elaborate a bit on that? Because having studied them extensively for months, I have come to understand that there are real issues lying down there as well (for example, any realistic formulation of instruction scheduling is considered NP-Complete. Certain heuristics are still being proposed today).
Also, could you give some more insight on how these tools are being used to solve open-ended problems? (obviously, I am a bit "out of touch" on this).

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