Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in MATLAB on Oct 9th, 2007
Tim O’Reilly likes to quote William Gibson when he describes his approach to predicting the future: “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” In other words, if you can just find the people (O’Reilly calls them alpha geeks) who are leading the way, you can serve yourself a tasty slice of future [...]
Posted in MATLAB on Oct 26th, 2006
I’ve been spending a fair amount of time playing around with JavaScript these days. As the backbone of the Web 2.0 Ajax technology, homely old JavaScript is finally having its moment in the sun.
Ajax gets all the press, but I think bookmarklets are loveliest little JavaScript tools around. Bookmarklets (also called favelets in deference to [...]
Posted in MATLAB on Nov 16th, 2005
We had another MATLAB Programming Contest, and in terms of participation it was our biggest so far. We like contest themes that fit somehow into the zeitgeist, so the puzzle this time around was a generalized version of the notorious Sudoku puzzle genre.
Aside: if you are ever in a Sudoku-solving pickle, I’ve got just the [...]
Posted in MATLAB on Sep 8th, 2005
I get excited about the MATLAB Programming Contest that we run at The MathWorks because it’s such a cool and compelling window on how groups of humans work together to build complicate things. As such, it’s a sort of greenhouse model for some important trends in the modern infosphere, including open source programming and wikis. [...]
Posted in MATLAB on May 17th, 2005
Roughly every six months we run a MATLAB programming contest in which contestants are encouraged to steal the code that other people are submitting. Naturally, most people steal code from whoever’s leading, which makes the code churn and improve very quickly. This version of the contest, number ten, involves giving instructions to ants so [...]
Posted in MATLAB on Sep 8th, 2004
Last spring I wrote an article for interactions magazine, the official magazine of SIGCHI, the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction. My paper was about the MATLAB Online Programming Contest, which I’ve mentioned in this space a few times. You can’t get the article from the interactions website without an ACM membership, but my [...]
Posted in MATLAB on Jul 20th, 2004
Suppose you wanted to build your own sundial. Where would you start? If you know how to use MATLAB, I can tell you exactly what to do. As part of my day job, I work on an online community called MATLAB Central. Recently we’ve added the ability to upload web pages there that have been [...]
Posted in MATLAB on Apr 27th, 2004
Our latest MATLAB Programming Contest is nearing completion. Since this is an election year, the puzzle this time (”Gerrymander”) is to divide a state into electoral districts of equal population. If you want to see real gerrymandering in action, look at this: 107th Congressional Districts. Dallas/Ft. Worth is particularly interesting.
Matt has done almost all the [...]
Posted in MATLAB on Nov 11th, 2002
Since this is my baby, I can’t possibly not link to it: We’re running another online MATLAB programming contest this week. It started last Wednesday and will end this Wednesday. There are a zillion programming contests out there, but this one is special because your answer is evaluated and posted in real time. It’s sort [...]
