Tag Archives: compsci

Blog, Examples

Binary Puzzles

1 Comment

As you can probably tell, I’m a big fan of puzzles. On one hand you can say that a good puzzle is nothing but particular instance of a complex problem that we’re being asked to solve. What exactly makes a problem complex though?

To a large extent that depends on the person playing the puzzles. Different puzzles are based on different concepts and meant to highlight different concepts. Some puzzles really focus on dynamic programming like the Triangle Sum Puzzles or the Unidirectional TSP Puzzles.

Other puzzles are based on more complicated problems, in many cases instances of NP-complete problems. Unlike the puzzles mentioned above, there is generally no known optimal strategy for solving these puzzles quickly. Some basic examples of these are ones like Independent Set Puzzles, which just give a random (small) instance of the problem and ask users to solve it. Most approaches involve simply using logical deduction to reduce the number of possible choices until a “guess” must be made and then implementing some form of backtracking solution (which is not guessing since you can form a logical conclusion that if the guess you made were true, you reach either (a) a violation of the rules or (b) a completed puzzle).

One day a few months back i was driving home from work and traffic was so bad that i decided to stop at the store. While browsing the books, I noticed a puzzle collection. Among the puzzles I found in that book were the Range Puzzles I posted about earlier. However I also found binary puzzles.

Filled Binary puzzles are based on three simple rules
1. No the adjacent cells in any row or column can contain the same value (so no 000 or 111 in any row or column).
2. Every row must have the same number of zeros and ones.
3. Each row and column must be unique.

There is a paper from 2013 stating that Binary Puzzles are NP Complete. There is another paper that discusses strategies involved in Solving a Binary Puzzle. 

Once I finished the puzzles in that book the question quickly became (as it always does) where can I get more. I began writing a generator for these puzzles and finished it earlier this year. Now i want to share it with you. You can visit the examples section to play those games at Binary Puzzles.

Below I will go over a sample puzzle and how I go about solving it. First lets look at a 6 by 6 puzzle with some hints given:

 01   
0 10  
11 0  
 1  0 
   0  
1  1 0

We look at this table and can first look for locations where we have a “forced move”. An obvious choice for these moves wold be three adjacent cells in the same row or column where two have the same value. A second choice is that when we see that a row or column has the correct number of zeros or ones, the remaining cells in that row or column must have the opposite value.

So in the above puzzle, we can see that the value in cells (2, 2) and (2, 5) must also be a 0 because cells (2, 3) and (2, 4) are both 1. Now we see that column 2 has 5 of its 6 necessary values, and three 0’s. So the last value in this column (2, 6) must be a 1 in order for there to be an equal number of 0s and 1s.

For some easier puzzles these first two move types will get you far enough to completely fill in all the cells. For more advanced puzzles though, this may require a little more thorough analysis. 

As always, check it out and let me know what you think. 

Examples

Lets Learn About XOR Encryption

2 Comments

One of the more common things about this generation is the constant desire to write up (type) their thoughts. So many of the conversations from my high school days were long lasting, but quickly forgotten. Today’s generation is much more likely to blog, tweet, write status updates or simply open up a notepad file and write up their thoughts after such a conversation.

When we feel that our thoughts are not ready for public eyes (maybe you want to run your idea by the Patent and Trademark Office before speaking about it) we may seek some form of security to ensure that they stay private. An old fashioned way of doing this was to write in a diary and enclosed it within a lock and key. The mathematical field of encryption also tries to grant privacy by encoding messages so that only people with the necessary information can read them.

The type of encryption I want to speak about today is called XOR encryption. It is based on the logical operation called “exclusive or” (hence the name XOR). The exclusive or operation is true between two logical statements if exactly one of the two statements is true, but not both statement. This can be represented with the following truth table

Input 1Input2XOR Result
TTF
TFT
FTT
FFF

XOR Encryption is particularly useful in this day and age because we every character we type is understood by the computer as a sequence of zeros and ones. The current standard encoding that is used is Unicode (also known as UTF-8). Under this encoding the letter ‘a’ is represented as the binary string ‘01100001’. Similarly every letter, number and special character can be represented as its own binary string. These binary strings are just an assignment of numbers to these characters so that we can to help represent them in the computer. The numbers can the be thought of in base 10, which is how we generally think about numbers, or in base 2 which is how computers generally work with numbers (or a number of other ways). The way we would use these binary strings in encoding is first by translating a text from human-readable text to machine readable text via its binary string. For example, the word “Invincible”, we would get the following binary strings:

LetterUnicode in base 10Unicode in base 2
I7301001001
n11001101110
v11801110110
i10501101001
n11001101110
c9901100011
i10501101001
b9801100010
l10801101100
e10101100101

To encrypt the message we need a key to encode the message and will simply perform an XOR operation on the key and every character in the string. Similarly, do decrypt the message we perform XOR operation on the key and every character in the encoded message. This means that the key (much like a normal key to a diary) must be kept private and only those whom the message is to be shared between have access to it.

Here is a link to the script where you can check out XOR Encrpytio. Try it out and let me know what you think.

Examples

Discrete-time Markov Chains

1 Comment

Much of how we interact with life could be described as transitions between states. These states could be weather conditions (whether we are in a state of “sunny” or “rainy”), the places we may visit (maybe “school”, “the mall”, “the park” and “home”), our moods (“happy”, “angry”, “sad”). There are a number of other ways to model states and even the possibility of infinitely many states.

Markov Chains are based on the principle that the future is only dependent on the immediate past. so for example, if I wished to predict tomorrow’s weather using a Markov Chain, I would need to only look at the weather for today, and can ignore all previous data. I would then compare the state of weather for today with historically how weather has changed in between states to determine the most likely next state (i.e what the weather will be like tomorrow). This greatly simplifies the construction of models.

To use Markov Chains to predict the future, we first need to compute a transition matrix which shows the probability (or frequency) that we will travel from one state to another based on how often we have done so historically. This transition matrix can be calculated by looking at each element of the history as an instance of a discrete state, counting the number of times each transition occurs and dividing each result by the number of times the origin state occurs. I’ll next give an example and then I’ll focus on explaining the Finite Discrete State Markov Chain tool I built using javascript.

Next, I want to consider an example of using Markov Chains to predict the weather for tomorrow. Suppose that we have observed the weather for the last two weeks. We could then use that data to build a model to predict tomorrow’s weather. To do this, lets first consider some states of weather. Suppose that a day can be classified in one of four different ways: {Sunny, Cloudy, Windy, Rainy}. Further, suppose that over the last two weeks we have seen the following pattern.

Day 1Sunny
Day 2Sunny
Day 3Cloudy
Day 4Rain
Day 5Sunny
Day 6Windy
Day 7Rain
Day 8Windy
Day 9Rain
Day 10Cloudy
Day 11Windy
Day 12Windy
Day 13Windy
Day 14Cloudy

We can look at this data and calculate the probability that we will transition from each state to each other state, which we see below:

RainCloudyWindySunny
Rain 0 1/3 1/3 1/3
Cloudy 1/2 0 1/2 0
Windy 2/5 1/5 2/5 0
Sunny 0 1/3 1/3 1/3

Given that the weather for today is cloudy, we can look at the transition matrix and see that historically the days that followed a cloudy day have been Rainy and Windy days each with probability of 1/5. We can see this more mathematically by multiplying the current state vector (cloudy) [0, 1, 0, 0] by the above matrix, where we obtain the result [1/2, 0, 1/2, 0].

In similar fashion, we could use this transition matrix (lets call it T) to predict the weather a number of days in the future by looking at Tn. For example, if we wanted to predict the weather two days in the future, we could begin with the state vector [1/2, 0, 1/2, 0] and multiply it by the matrix T to obtain [1/5, 4/15, 11/30, 1/6].

We can also obtain this by looknig at the original state vector [0, 1, 0, 0] and multiplying it by T2.

T2 =

1

3/108/4537/901/9
1/54/1511/301/6
13/5016/7559/1502/15
3/108/4537/901/9

When we multiply the original state vector by T2 we arrive at this same answer [1/5, 4/15, 11/30, 1/6]. This matrix T2 has an important property in that every state can reach every other state.

In general, if we have a transition matrix where for every cell in row i and column j, there is some power of the transition matrix such that the cell (i, j) in that matrx is nonzero, then we say that every state is reachable from every other state and we call the Markov Chain regular.

Regular Markov Chains are important because they converge to what’s called a steady state. These are state vectrs x = [x0, …, xn] such that xTn = x for very large values of n. The steady state tells us how the Markov Chain will perform over long periods of time. We can use algebra and systems of linear equations to solve for this steady state vector.

For the Javascript program I’ve written, I have generated a set of painting samples for a fictional artist. The states are the different colors and the transitions are the colors that the artist will use after other colors. as well as the starting and ending colors. Given this input, we can form a Markov Chain to understand the artist’s behavior. This Markov Chain can then be used to solve for the steady state vector or to generate random paintings according to the artist’s profile. Be sure to check it out and let me know what you think.

Examples

The RSA Algorithm

2 Comments

I can remember back when I was in school, still deciding whether I wanted to study pure or applied mathematics. One of the common questions I would receive from those in applied mathematical realms would sound like “What’s the point of doing mathematics with no real world applications?”. Generally my response to these questions was about the intrinsic beauty of mathematics, no different from an artist painting not for some desire to be a millionaire, but because of an burning desire to paint. Whether their paintings would one day be on the walls of a Smithsonian museum or sit on their mother’s refrigerator is generally outside of the thought process of the artist. So too, would I argue about the thought process of a pure mathematician.

When I was an undergrad and learned about the RSA algorithm (named for Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman who discovered the algorithm) it helped me explain this concept a lot better. The algorithm is based on prime numbers and the problem of finding the divisors of a given number. Many mathematicians throughout the ages have written papers on the beauty of prime numbers (see Euclid, Eratosthenes, Fermat, Goldbach, etc). For a large period in time one of the beautiful things about prime numbers was that they were so interesting in themselves. There were questions about how to check if a number is prime, question of patterns in primes, famous conjectures like the Goldbach conjecture and the twin prime conjecture, quick ways of finding prime numbers or numbers that are almost always prime, etc. In short, this was an active area of research that much of the applied world was not using. This all changed in 1977 when Rivest, Shamir and Adleman published the RSA algorithm.

The algorithm is in the area called public key cryptography. These algorithms differ from many of the previous cryptography algorithms, namely symmetric key cryptography. Whereas symmetric key cryptography depends uses the same device (key) to encode as to decode, public key cryptography creates two keys – one for encoding that is generally shared with others, and another for decoding which is kept private. These two keys in generally relate to a mathematical problem that is very difficult to solve.

In my example script for the RSA Algorithm, I show two people who want to communicate, Alice and Bob. Bob wants people to be able to send him messages securely so he decides to use the RSA algorithm. To do this, he first needs to think of two prime numbers, p1 and p2.
From these, he computes the following:
n = p1 * p2

Next, he computes Euler’s function on this n which can be calculated as
(n) = (p1 – 1) * (p2 – 1)

Then Bob looks for a number e that is relatively prime to . This is what he will use as the encryption key.

One he has e, he can calculate d, which is the multiplicative inverse of e in (n).
This means that e * d = 1 (mod (n)).

The public key that will be used for encryption will be the pair (e, n). This is what he posts publicly via his web page for others to communicate with him securely. Bob also has a private key pair (d, n) that he will use to decrypt messages.

Alice sees Bob’s public key and would like to communicate with him. So she uses it to encode a message. The formula she uses to encrypt her message is c = me mod n, where c is the encrypted message. Once Alice encrypts her message, she sends it to Bob.

Bob receives this encoded message and uses the private key (d, n) to decode the message from Alice. The formula to decrypt is m = cd mod n.

For a more illustrative idea of how this algorithm works as well as examples, be sure to visit Script for the RSA Algorithm.

Blog

Dots and Boxes Game

5 Comments

Dots and Boxes Game

When I was in high school, one of my favorite ways to waste time in class (not recommended) was to play a game called dots and boxes (although at the time we just called it dots). I was very surprised to find later that this game belongs to a class of games called “Impartial Combinatorial Games”. These are games where the moves available to the player depend only on the position of the game, and not the player.

In a game of Dots and Boxes, we start with an initial grid with dots at each row and column intersection. At each player’s turn, they have the option of drawing either a horizontal or vertical line between two neighboring dots (depending on if the dots are in the same row or column). If a player fills in the last line on a box (the 4th side), we say that player “owns” the box. The game ends when there are no neighboring dots without a line between them. At the conclusion of the game, the player who owns the most dots is declared the winner.

The game is impartial because there is no restriction on which move a player can make other than the fact that a player cannot re-do a move that has already been made (a partial version of this game would be if player one could only move horizontally and player two could only move vertically).

I have implemented a javascript version of this game. Check it out and let me know what you think.

I also spoke earlier about the discovery that this game in particular was an active area of research. I wanted to provide a link to a paper entitled “Solving Dots and Boxes” by Joseph K. Barker and Richard E Korf that speaks about winning strategies for each player in a game of dots and boxes.