Craig Gidney is continuing his blog in a new home: strilanc.com. You can be notified about posts there by following his rss feed, or following him on twitter. There are already two posts on the new site. Building your own Quantum Fourier Transform, and Ordering Cyclic Sequence Numbers. — I find reading media coverage of quantum computers frustrating. With rare exceptions, the explanations of what a quantum computer is or can do are totally unsatisfying. I remember being really confused about the whole thing. “You say a quantum computer can be in two states at the same time? Sounds cool, but how does that [...] Naming is a strange thing. You take reality, cut a chunk out, assign a sequence of syllables to that chunk, and suddenly you see it everywhere. Having the right chunks named literally changes how you think. In this series of posts, “naming things”, I take some shows-up-everywhere concept from programming (that doesn’t have a name, [...] In this post: efficiently detecting when cycles appear, as edges are added to a graph, by taking advantage of a restriction on the type of graph. Motivation I worry a lot about little details. About ways people using my code might end up shooting themselves in the foot. Case in point: the collapsing futures library [...] In this post: using a trusted third party to make bit commitment perfectly secure. Motivation I wrote my master’s thesis on the subject of secret sharing, where a dealer splits some secret message into shares. Later on, players use some fraction of the shares to recover the secret. One of the tweaks to the problem [...] A few months ago, during the Halifax Game Jam, I realized that for a long time I’d thought angular velocities were more complicated than they actually are. Game Jam In October I attended the 2013 Halifax Game Jam. The theme was “discovery”. Actually, since the group I joined had an Occulus Rift, make that more [...] In this post: dealing with the corner cases inherent in checking if collections are equivalent. Collection Equality One of Objective-C’s features that I really like, but forgot to mention in A Year’s Worth of Opinions about Objective-C, is the built-in support for equating collections by value. When I’m working in C#, and I want to [...] In this post: a subtle way that reactive/event-based code can deadlock, how it affects ReactiveCocoa (obj-c) and Reactive Extensions (.Net), and ways to work around the problem. Realization Today I noticed that ReactiveCocoa, the Objective-C port of .Net’s Rx (Reactive Extensions), implements different semantics for its BehaviorSubject. This would be moderately interesting, except the change [...] In this post: a technique for parallelizing accumulation, when the accumulator only takes on a small number of states. Trigger Today I watched the talk How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not! by Guy Steele. (It’s really good. The first third is off topic and still really good.) About an hour into the talk, Steele [...] About one year ago, I was placed on my first Objective-C project: porting RedPhone from Android to iOS. My part of RedPhone (the backend: audio, networking, crypto) has been done for about a month now. We’re waiting for an external security review, but internally no back-end bugs have been stumbled over while work continues on [...]
strilanc
What Quantum Computers Do Faster, with Caveats
Naming Things: Fail-Useful
Detecting Simple Cycles Forming, Faster
Third Party Bit Commitment
Angular Velocity is Simple
Collection Equality is Hard
Deadlocks in Practice: Don’t Hold Locks While Notifying
Brute Force Parallelization
A Year’s Worth of Opinions about Objective-C
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