Disqus - Latest Comments for Tordek

Re: Hypothesis Testing: The Basics | 20bits

Tordek — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:28:06 -0000

"This means that there's only a 5% chance that this data was due to pure chance rather than a real difference between a fair coin and the coin you flipped."

Uh, I think you mean the other way around; there's a 5% chance that there's a real difference, and 95% that it was just a matter of luck. You're 95% sure that there is no difference.

Re: Boris

Tordek — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 08:56:00 -0000

You blew it on EMACS... had it been Ed, it'd have been awesome.

Re: Boris

Tordek — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:01:04 -0000

Slack, though I'm stuck on Debian for lack of 64b support; Vim; KDE (KWin...); C; Thunderbird.

Yeah, I've been spoiled by Windows...

Re: http://www.janitha.com/archives/28

Tordek — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:40:00 -0000

Heya, long time no reading you...

So, it turns out there was already a name for this problem: shortest common superstring. That is good: it means it's solved.

The bad news is, it's not a pretty problem. It's a variation of the Traveling Salesman, and if I recall correctly, it has O(2^n) complexity. Which is bad, since it grows quickly with n... and n isn't a cute little button in this case: in a key of length k and an alphabet of length m, n = m^k + k - 1.

So, while it has a solution (a DNA article discussing the topic has as an example a weighed graph with the keys as vertices and the string difference as edges' weights), it's not the fastest one... (Although, on a second look at that definition, the shortest distance is a constant (if i'm right), so edges with greater distance could be dropped, given they're superficial, and this would be a special case with O(n) complexity...

That is, you know, assuming I'm right...