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August 31, 2003
[From the archive] Sunday Dinner: Massaman Curry
We use cashews instead of peanuts (like Thai Chili Garden in Provo does), about 2x the cayenne peper and more chicken. We use the left over can of coconut milk for sweet rice and the left over chicken broth in the rice. Don't forget to add the tomatoes![Cooking.com - Massaman Curry ]
Posted by jones at 02:19 PM | Comments (0)
August 28, 2003
[From the archive] Conference Management Software
This is the conference management software I will use for peer review of proofs and proof setups in CS 611 a course on theoretical computer science for graduate students. The idea is to mimic the oft-neglected, but important, social process of proof.
[Summary of Conference Management Software, WIMPE]
Posted by jones at 06:20 PM | Comments (0)
[From the archive] Valgrind
What I use to find memory leaks in my code. Use valgrind --leak-check=yes --leak-resolution=high < program and args > [ Valgrind, an open-source memory debugger for x86-linux]
Posted by jones at 03:56 PM | Comments (0)
[From the archive] Social Insect Travel Plans
I should clarify. These are plans for us to travel to a workshop on social insects. Even worse, its a Georgia Tech, home of the yellow jackets. December 15-17, 2003. Monday through Wednesday. We have a poster at the workshop about adaptation in feedback loops for parallel model checking based on honeybee forager allocation behavior. [The Mathematics and Algorithms of Social Insects, hotel info]
Airfare: about $300
Hotel: about $200
conference fee: $250
Food: $150
Total: $900 per person. Assuming we split the hotel room and don't rent a car.
Posted by jones at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)
August 27, 2003
[From the archive] Guided Model checking in HSF Spin
We are currently working on a guided model checker that uses Bayes' rule to revise cost estimates. The resulting heurstic is inadmissible, but guides us to errors more quickly. This paper uses a presumably admissible heurstic in A* search, but A* search does not appear to be significantly superior to a greedy search with the same heuristic.
page 13. The heurstic generating function is not admissible because g^h can be satisfied in one step if g and h are satisfied by the change of a single variable. The heuristic generating function for g^h returns the cost of satisfing g plus the cost of satisfying h. If g and h are satisfied by the same transition, then the heurstic over-estimates the cost and inadmissible.
page 16. A* "seems to work better with the Hf+U[formula-based heurstic plus user annotations] than the Hap [the active process based heurstic]. But best-first results for either heuristic are similar." And that's why the best-first results use Hap rather than Hf+U.
pages 17-19. A total of 20 data points are given for non-LTL properties in the paper. Of those 20 data points, BF finds the error at the same depth in 8, BF finds the error within 50% of A* in 12, BF generates 1/5th as many states as A* in 8, BF generates the same or fewer states in 14. There are notable exeptions both ways. In one problem (dining philosophers with 12 diners), BF found an error at almost twice the depth after expanding more than 7 times as many statses. In another problem, BF found an error at the same depth after expanding less than 1/300th as many states. Including path costs results in shorter paths to errors in just over 1/2 of the data points while requiring expanding 5 times as many states in 4/10 data points. While these results are hardly an endorsement of best first search, they are not a clear endorsement of A* search either.
Posted by jones at 12:25 AM | Comments (0)
August 26, 2003
[From the archive] Online literature search resources
[HBLL list of CS subject resources] BYU has subscriptions to useful online databases, such as IEEE and ACM, that you can access from any computer on campus. BYU also has a subscription to SpringerLink, which gets access to the contents of LNCS issues.
Posted by jones at 04:33 PM | Comments (0)
[From the archive] MIT OpenCourseWare
[Wired 11.09: MIT Everyware, MIT OpenCourseWare, 6.001]
MIT has some of their course online, including lecture notes, exams, projects, tools, etc. Apparently, this has been online for the better part of a year now. As a designer of CS classes, its useful to me to visit another CS class and see how someone else designed their class. They even have 6.001 online, which uses one of my personal favorite CS Textbooks, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
Posted by jones at 02:58 PM | Comments (0)
August 25, 2003
[From the archive] Mike Jones' Blog: v3.0
[Mike Jones' Former Mostly CS Blog] So it turns out that our Movable Type blog died a sad and lonely death. This required restarting and resetting everything. A post mortem revealed that the disk on which the blog administrator resides became full. A database became corrupt and things went down hill from there. So this is a link to my new, old blog (which includes a link to my old blog). Maybe we'll be stable from here?
Posted by jones at 01:34 PM | Comments (0)