Tag Archives: learning

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:

	0	1
0		1	0
1	1		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

Floyd-Warshall Shortest Paths

August 10, 2017 AfterMath 2 Comments

The Floyd Warshall algorithm is an all pairs shortest paths algorithm. This can be contrasted with algorithms like Dijkstra’s which give the shortest paths from a single node to all other nodes in the graph.

Floyd Warshall’s algorithm works by considering first the edge set of the graph. This is the set of all paths of the graph through one edge. Node pairs that are connected to one another through an edge will have their shortest path set to the length of that edge, while all other node pairs will have their shortest path set to infinity. The program then runs through every triplet of nodes (i, j, k) and checks if the path from i to k and the path from k to j is shorter than the current path from i to j. If so, then the distance and the path is updated.

So lets consider an example on the graph in the image above. The edge set of this graph is E = {(0, 1), (0, 2), (0, 3), (1, 3), (3, 4)}. So our initial table is:

	0	1	2	3	4
0	inf	(0, 1)	(0, 2)	(0, 3)	inf
1	(0, 1)	inf	inf	(1, 3)	inf
2	(0, 2)	inf	inf	inf	inf
3	(0, 3)	(1, 3)	inf	inf	(3, 4)
4	inf	inf	inf	(3, 4)	inf

As we look to update the paths, we first look for routes that go through node 0:

Because node 0 connects to both node 1 and node 2, but node 1 does not connect to node 2, we have the following truth holding in the matrix above:
cost(0, 1) + cost(0, 2) < cost(1, 2), so we can update the shortest path from node 1 to node 2 to be (1, 0, 2).

Because node 0 connects to both node 2 and node 3, but node 2 does not connect to node 3, we have the following truth holding in the matrix above:
cost(0, 2) + cost(0, 3) < cost(2, 3), so we can update the shortest path from node 2 to node 3 to be (2, 0, 3).

Because node 3 connects to both node 0 and node 4, but node 0 does not connect to node 4, we have the following truth holding in the matrix above:
cost(0, 3) + cost(3, 4) < cost(0, 4), so we can update the shortest path from node 0 to node 4 to be (0, 3, 4).

Because node 3 connects to both node 1 and node 4, but node 1 does not connect to node 4, we have the following truth holding in the matrix above:
cost(1, 3) + cost(3, 4) < cost(1, 4), so we can update the shortest path from node 1 to node 4 to be (1, 3, 4).

Because node 3 connects to both node 2 and node 4, but node 2 does not connect to node 4, we have the following truth now holding:
cost(2, 3) + cost(3, 4) < cost(2, 4), so we can update the shortest path from node 2 to node 4 to be (2, 0, 3, 4).

The final table giving the list of shortest paths from every node to every other node is given below.

	0	1	2	3	4
0	inf	(0, 1)	(0, 2)	(0, 3)	(0, 3, 4)
1	(0, 1)	inf	(1, 0, 2)	(1, 3)	(1, 3, 4)
2	(0, 2)	(1, 0, 2)	inf	(2, 0, 3)	(2, 0, 3, 4)
3	(0, 3)	(1, 3)	(2, 0, 3)	inf	(3, 4)
4	(0, 3, 4)	(1, 3, 4)	(2, 0, 3, 4)	(3, 4)	inf

To see more examples and to help answer questions, check out the script in my examples section on the Floyd-Warshall algorithm

Examples

The Depth-First-Search Algorithm

October 28, 2015 AfterMath 1 Comment

I remember when I was younger I used to play the game of hide-and-seek a lot. This is a game where a group of people (at least two) separate into a group of hiders and a group of seekers. The most common version of this that I’ve seen is having one person as the seeker and everyone as hiders. Initially, the seeker(s) is given a number to count towards and close their eyes while counting. The hiders then search for places to hide from the seeker. Once the seeker is finished counting, their job is to find where everyone is hiding or admitting that they cannot find all the seekers. Any seekers not found are said to have won, and seekers that are found are said to have lost.

I played this game a number of times in my childhood, but I remember playing it with a friend named Dennis in particular. Dennis had a certain way he played as seeker. While many of us would simply go to places we deemed as “likely” hiding spots in a somewhat random order, Dennis would always begin by looking in one area of the room, making sure that he had searched through every area connected to that area before going to a new area. He continued this process until he either found everybody or concluded that he had searched every spot he could think of and gave up.

It wasn’t until years later that I was able to note the similarity between Dennis’s way of playing hide-and-seek and the Depth-First-Search algorithm. The Depth-First-Search Algorithm is a way of exploring all the nodes in a graph. Similar to hide-and-seek, one could choose to do this in a number of different ways. Depth-First-Search does this by beginning at some node, looking first at one of the neighbors of that node, then looking at one of the neighbors of this new node. If the new node does not have any new neighbors, then the algorithm goes to the previous node, looks at the next neighbor of this node and continues from there. Initially all nodes are “unmarked” and the algorithm proceeds by marking nodes as being in one of three states: visited nodes are marked as “visited”; nodes that we’ve marked to visit, but have not visited yet are marked “to-visit”; and unmarked nodes that have not been marked or visited are “unvisited”.

Consider a bedroom with the following possible hiding locations: (1) Under Bed, (2) Behind Cabinet, (3) In Closet, (4) Under Clothes, (5) Behind Curtains, (6) Behind Bookshelf, and (7) Under Desk. We can visualize how the bedroom is arranged as a graph and then use a Breadth First Search algorithm to show how Brent would search the room. Consider the following bedroom arrangement, where we have replaced the names of each item by the number corresponding to that item. Node (0) corresponds to the door, which is where Dennis stands and counts while others hide.

Now consider how a Breadth First Search would be run on this graph.

The colors correspond to the order in which nodes are visited in Depth-First-Search.

The way we read this is that initially Dennis would start at node 0, which is colored in Blue.
While Dennis is at node 0, she notices that nodes 1, 5, and 6 (under bed, behind curtains, and behind bookshelf) are the nearby and have not been checked yet so she places them on the “to visit” list.
Next, Dennis will begin to visit each node on the “to visit” list, and when a node is visited, she labels it as visited. At each location, she also takes note of the other locations she can reach from this location. Below is the order of nodes Dennis visits and how he discovers new locations to visit.

Order Visited	Node	Queue	Adding	Distance From Node 0
1	0		6,5,1	0
2	6	5,1	7,3,2	1
3	7	3,2,5,1		2
4	3	2,5,1		2
5	2	5,1	4	2
6	4	5,1		3
7	5	1		1
8	1			1

Here is a link to my Examples page that implements the Depth-First-Search Algorithm on Arbitrary Graphs.

Examples

The Breadth-First-Search Algorithm

October 28, 2015 AfterMath 1 Comment

I played this game a number of times in my childhood, but I remember playing it with a friend named Brenda in particular. Brenda had a certain way she played as seeker. While many of us would simply go to places we deemed as “likely” hiding spots in a somewhat random order, Brenda would always take a survey of the room, and no matter where she began searching, she would always make note of the locations close to her starting point and make sure she was able to give them all a look before she looked at locations that were close to the points she deemed close to the starting point. She continued this process until she either found everybody or concluded that she had searched every spot she could think of and gave up.

It wasn’t until years later that I was able to note the similarity between Brenda’s way of playing hide-and-seek and the Breadth-First-Search algorithm. The Breadth-First-Search algorithm is a way of exploring all the nodes in a graph. Similarly to hide-and-seek, one could choose to do this in a number of different ways. Breadth-First-Search does this by beginning at some node, looking first at each of the neighbors of the starting node, then looking at each of the neighbors of the neighbors of the starting node, continuing this process until there are no remaining nodes to visit. Initially all nodes are “unmarked” and the algorithm proceeds by marking nodes as being in one of three stages: visited nodes are marked as “visited”; nodes that we’ve marked to visit, but have not visited yet are marked “to-visit”; and unmakred nodes that have not been marked are “unvisited”.

Consider a bedroom with the following possible hiding locations: (1) Under Bed, (2) Behind Cabinet, (3) In Closet, (4) Under Clothes, (5) Behind Curtains, (6) Behind Bookshelf, and (7) Under Desk. We can visualize how the bedroom is arranged as a graph and then use a Breadth First Search algorithm to show how Brenda would search the room. Consider the following bedroom arrangement, where we have replaced the names of each item by the number corresponding to that item. Node (0) corresponds to the door, which is where Brenda stands and counts while others hide.

Now consider how a Breadth First Search would be run on this graph.

The colors correspond to the order in which nodes are visited in Breadth-First-Search.

The way we read this is that initially Brenda would start at node 0, which is colored in Blue.
While Brenda is at node 0, she notices that nodes 1, 5, and 6 (under bed, behind curtains, and behind bookshelf) are the nearby and have not been checked yet so she places them on the “to visit” list.
Next, Brenda will begin to visit each node on the “to visit” list, and when a node is visited, she labels it as visited. At each location, she also takes note of the other locations she can reach from this location. Below is the order of nodes Brenda visits and how she discovers new locations to visit.

Order Visited	Node	Queue	Adding Distance From Node 0
1	0	–	1, 5, 6	0
2	1	5, 6	2, 4	1
3	5	6, 2, 4	–	1
4	6	2, 4	3, 7	1
5	2	4, 3, 7	–	2
6	4	3, 7	–	2
7	3	7	–	2
8	7	–	–	2

Here is a link to my Examples page that implements the Breadth-First-Search Algorithm on Arbitrary Graphs.

Examples

ID3 Algorithm Decision Trees

September 23, 2015 AfterMath 2 Comments

As I grow LEARNINGlover.com, I’m always thinking of different ways to expose my own personality through the site. This is partially because it is easier for me to talk about subjects where I am already knowledgeable, but it is more-so being done to help make some of these algorithms and concepts I encode more understandable, and sometimes relating foreign concepts to everyday life makes them easier to understand.

Today, I’d like to write about decision trees, and the ID3 algorithm for generating decision trees in particular. This is a machine learning algorithm that builds a model from a training data set consisting of a feature vector and an outcome. Because our data set consists of an outcome element, this falls into the category of supervised machine learning.

The model that the ID3 algorithm builds is called a decision tree. It builds a tree based on the features, or columns of the data set with a possible decision corresponding to each value that the feature can have. The algorithm selects the next feature by asking “which feature tells me the most about our data set?” This question can be answered first by asking how much “information” is in the data set, and then comparing that result with the amount of information in each individual feature.

In order to execute this algorithm we need a way to measure both the amount the information in outcomes of the overall data set as well as how much each feature tells us about the data set. For the first, we will use entropy, which comes from the field of information theory and encoding. Entropy is based on the question of how many bits are necessary to encode the information in a set. The more information, the higher the entropy, and the more bits required to encode that information. Although we are not encoding, the correlation between high information and high entropy suits our purposes.

Entropy Formula

To understand how much each feature tells us about the outcomes of the data set we will build on the concept of entropy to define the information gain of a feature. Each feature has multiple options, so the dataset can be partitioned based on each possible value of this feature. Once we have this partition, we can calculate the entropy of each subset of the rows of data. We define the information gain of a feature as the sum over all possible outcomes of that feature can have of the entropy of that outcome multiplied by the probability of that outcome.

Information Gain Formula

To illustrate this algorithm, I decided to relate it to the question of whether we think of a character in a novel as a hero or villain. This is interesting because I try to read at least one book a month and as I’m reading, I often find myself asking this question about characters based on the traits of the characters as well as characters I’ve read about. In order to build an interactive script for this problem, I considered 25 possible character traits that could be present. A subset of these 25 character traits will be selected and a row will be generated grading a fictional character on a scale of 0 to 3 (0 meaning that they do not possess the trait at all, 3 meaning that the trait is very strong in their personality), and users will be asked whether they think a character with the given character traits should be listed as a hero or a villain. Then there is a button at the bottom of the script with the text “Build Tree” that executes the ID3 Algorithm and shows a decision tree that could be used to reach the set of decisions given by the user.

The possible features are:
Abstract, Adaptable, Aggressive, Ambition, Anxiety, Artistic, Cautious, Decisive, Honesty, Dutiful, Fitness, Intellect, Independent, Introverted, Lively, Open-minded, Orderly, Paranoid, Perfectionist, Romantic, Sensitive, Stable, Tension, Warmth and Wealthy

Once users select the option to build the tree, there will be several links outlining each step in the process to build this tree. These links will allow for users to expand the information relating to that step and minimize that information when done. Hopefully this will help users to understand each step more. I must say that as much fun as it has been writing this program, there were several questions when trying to explain it to others. Hopefully users get as much fun from using this tool as I had in creating it. As always feel free to contact me with any comments and or questions.

Ok, so here’s a link to the ID3 Algorithm Page. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

A collection of scripts to help users gain a love of mathematics, computer science, probability and how they interact with the world around us.