Geocoding: Trials and Tribulations
For the past few months I have had a small project on the back burner to try and make geocoding easier. The motivation can be traced back to the data collection I had to do for the data I needed for my research on minimising the amount of travelling that football supporters have to do […]
Vehicle Routing Datasets
For reasons which will become apparent in the fullness of time I have recently been trying to track down all the vehicle routing datasets that are out there; specifically the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). I know that the problem was introduced in 1959 (with small instances being made available in that paper1) and I […]
Conjuring Trick: Revealed
Thank you for all the feedback to my last blog, both personally and through facebook. The answer is that information is communicated via the four remaining cards. It is not obvious how it is done but take a look at the article by Colm Mulcahy, which explains all. If you are interested in these sort […]
Conjuring Trick
I recently came across another blog (I’ll point you to that blog at a later date), which has a number of puzzles on it. One, in particular caught my eye (probably because of a long time fascination with conjuring). The trick works as follows. A volunteer chooses five cards from a normal pack of cards. […]
Claude Shannon, Edward Thorp, Roulette and Blackjack
I guess many people have heard of Claude Shannon (information theory/entropy). Perhaps not as many people have also heard of Edward Thorpe? I have known of his work for many years as he was chiefly responsible for making the gambling industry change the rules of blackjack1,2. Not only did he develop something called basic strategy […]
P vs NP
I have just read an excellent article in the latest issue of Communications of the ACM. Fortnow L. (2009) The Status of the P versus NP Problem Communications of the ACM, 52(9):78-86 (doi:10.1145/1562164.1562186) The article not only describes what the P=NP problem is (and it is one of the best non-technical descriptions I have seen) […]
The 2009 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games: Report
I have just spent the last week at the 2009 IEEE Symposium on Computation Intelligence and Games in Milan (see last post). It has been an excellent week both from a scientific point of view and from a networking point of view (I have even added a few new facebook friends as a result of […]
The 2009 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games
I have just arrived in Milan for the 2009 CIG (Computational Intelligence and Games) conference. This was a conference that Simon Lucas and I started in 2005. Simon is now editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Games. The 2005 conference, I believe, was partly responsible for paving the way […]
Random Number Generation
We all know that computer generated random numbers are not really random at all, but just pseudo-random. And I know that is a lot of discussion about how best to generate random numbers. To be honest, I have not taken much notice of this in all the programming that I have done but today I […]
Football Prediction: A decision to be made
Today I have been working on my research that is investigating if it is possible to predict the outcome of football matches. The measure I will eventually use, to see if the predictions can be considered successful, will include if it can make money at the bookmakers, if it it more successful than other tipsters […]