Starting this web site has served as the perfect opportunity to unwind. In particular, two blogs I wrote recently have served different purposes. The first was “The Degrees of Consciousness of a Black Nerd“, where I spoke about many of the things I think about being who I am and relating the the (somewhat unique) set of people that I communicate with on a daily basis. The other was what I’ve been working on since mid December. Its the blog entry I wrote on Sudoku and the Sudoku program that I wrote last month using the Dancing Links Algorithm. Since originally writing that, I’ve updated the program with a lot of Sudoku problems, as well as two types of “hints”. One generates the “possibilities matrix” which basically just shows what is possible for each cell. The other scans the possibilities matrix and searches for isolated cells (cells where some number can only go in one row/column/subgrid). Both those additions were extremely fun and provided a nice opportunity to program in my spare time.

So I’ve been thinking about these two things and how much I enjoyed the two, but for different reasons. The Degrees of Consciousness of a Black Nerd brought much attention on facebook where the idea was both accepted and rejected and I was able to explain the ideas further and hear similar stories from others who had similar experiences. Sudoku, on the other hand hasn’t generated as much conversation. A few friends have told me that they liked the program, but I don’t know of too many people outside of myself using it. That’s OK. I didn’t really create the program for publication, moreso because I enjoy Sudoku and took it as a challenge to write a program to solve a puzzle.

That being said, I’ve been thinking about some other things that I would like to do – hopefully they’ll be more than just my opinion, but have some programming, operations research, or mathematical context to them as well. But here’s a list of things that I want to write about in the near future.

• Connections between math and football (or sports in general). Anybody who knows me knows that I’m a huge sports fan. At other sites, I’ve posted stuff on QB rating systems and the flaws/inaccuracies in them. Part of me would like to look further into this stuff and either do a comparison, create a new rating system, or just try to understand (explain) different scouting metrics, particularly for QBs.
• I wrote the Sudoku program, but that’s a well studied problem so it was easy to find research that helped me to understand other stuff. I also studied some problems in Ramsey Theory that can be represented by exact covering algorithms and it would be interesting to try to represent these as exact cover problems and to try to use the Dancing Links algorithm to solve these problems as well, maybe to find a comparative analysis to benchmarks.
• One of the things I’ve picked up on lately is machine learning. While I’ve added flash cards on Bayesian Networks, I would like to add some programs on things like k-means clustering.
• I added my sorting algorithms a few weeks ago, but would like to also add something on data structures (arrays, linked lists, trees, heaps, hash tables, etc). In undergrad this was called the class that weeded people out of computer science majors, so doing something on this type of stuff I think could be helpful to those who want to understand it better.
• I have been in the process of writing a linear programming (Simplex) implementation for a while. I would like to get back to that to allow for a solver that can do at least simple algorithms.
• I’ve written a few drafts that connect math to different areas that I’m interested in (music, sports, philosophy, religion, etc), but I need to find a better way to present the stuff because as they’re currently stated, this stuff can easily be misinterpreted.

The beautiful thing about this site is that I’m not constrained by any advisor or boss or deadlines. Its more of a how am I feeling right now kind of a thing and these are the things I’m feeling right now. So this list is kind of my “New Years Resolutions” for LEARNINGlover.com, and while I reserve the right to change my priorities any time I feel that something else deserves my attention more, these are the things I’m planning to spend time on in the next few weeks.