No. A malicious machine on your network could use ARP spoofing (or a number of other techniques) to intercept your pings and reply to them after certain periods. They would then not only know what your random numbers are, but they would also control them. Of course there’s still the question of how deterministic your … Read more
Fuzzy logic is logic where state membership is, essentially, a float with range 0..1 instead of an int 0 or 1. The mileage you get out of it is that things like, for example, the changes you make in a control system are somewhat naturally more fine-tuned than what you’d get with naive binary logic. … Read more
Set.retainAll() is how you find the intersection of two sets. If you use HashSet, then converting your ArrayLists to Sets and using retainAll() in a loop over all of them is actually O(n).
Statistics. The de facto standard for testing RNGs is the Diehard suite (originally available at http://stat.fsu.edu/pub/diehard). Alternatively, the Ent program provides tests that are simpler to interpret but less comprehensive. As for shuffling algorithms, use a well-known algorithm such as Fisher-Yates (a.k.a “Knuth Shuffle”). The shuffle will be uniformly random so long as the underlying … Read more
You can do: someBool = (someStatement) ? true : someBool; I don’t think that gains you a lot of clarity over: if (someStatement) { someBool = true; } But it really seems to be a matter of taste. I wouldn’t say either is clearly bad, but the former is uncommon, so I’d probably avoid it. … Read more
The reason that Turing Machines are a big deal has to do with the study of classical Computing Science or Theory of Computation type stuff. It’s basically about analyzing the general properties of a computer, such as what theoretical abilities and limitations a computer has, as well as what we mean when we talk about … Read more
While a block is just a piece of code that can be composed by statements and declarations but nothing else, a closure is a real first-class object, a real variable that has a block as its value. The main difference is that a block simply groups instructions together (for example the body of a while … Read more
If you are trying to remove the occasional odd value, a low-pass filter is the best of the three options that you have identified. Low-pass filters allow low-speed changes such as the ones caused by rotating a compass by hand, while rejecting high-speed changes such as the ones caused by bumps on the road, for … Read more
There is a great trick to calculate the absolute value of a 2s-complement integer without using an if statement. The theory goes, if the value is negative you want to toggle the bits and add one, otherwise you want to pass the bits through as is. A XOR 1 happens to toggle A and A … Read more
Good question and I don’t know, but I would suspect the root of the problem is going to lie in HTML and therefore it’s rendering engines being originally intended for document semantics as opposed to layout/printing semantics. CSS is exceptionally good at describing paragraphs, headings, and all kinds of document concerns and really weak when … Read more