How to Choose Colours Procedurally (Algorithms)

Colour is surprisingly complex. How colour works is determined by the physics of light and materials, the biology of our eyes and brains, mixed with a bit of psychology.

Although you don’t need to know all about the physics, biology, and psychology of colour vision, it is useful to have some background information (which you can find references to at the end of this article).

http://devmag.org.za/2012/07/29/how-to-choose-colours-procedurally-algorithms/

How random is pseudo-random?

After introducing true and pseudo-random number generators, and presenting the methods used to measure randomness, this article details a number of common statistical tests used to evaluate the quality of random number generators.


http://pit-claudel.fr/clement/blog/how-random-is-pseudo-random-testing-pseudo-random-number-generators-and-measuring-randomness/

Replace recursive functions to avoid stack overflow

There are cases where we prefer to use recursive functions such as sort (Merge Sort) or tree operations (heapify up / heapify down). However, if the recursive function goes too deep in some environments, such as in Visual C++ code, an unwanted result might occur such as a stack-overflow. Many professional developers probably already know how to replace recursive functions to avoid stack-overflow problems in advance by replacing with iterative function or using stack (heap stack) and while-loop (recursive simulation function). However I thought it would be a great idea to share simple and general methods (or guidelines) to replace the recursive functions using stack (heap stack) and while-loop to avoid the stack-overflow to help novice developers.

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/418776/How-to-replace-recursive-functions-using-stack-and

Which programming languages are fastest?

This page has an interactive comparison chart what lets you compare the speeds of a bunch of different programming languages for various benchmarks.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/which-programming-languages-are-fastest.php

Norvig vs. Chomsky and the Fight for the Future of AI

Geek fight between linguists and artificial intelligence researchers:

Chomsky derided researchers in machine learning who use purely statistical methods to produce behavior that mimics something in the world, but who don’t try to understand the meaning of that behavior. Chomsky compared such researchers to scientists who might study the dance made by a bee returning to the hive, and who could produce a statistically based simulation of such a dance without attempting to understand why the bee behaved that way. “That’s a notion of [scientific] success that’s very novel. I don’t know of anything like it in the history of science,” said Chomsky.