Posts by AuburnMathTutor

Sorry if I offended you, but that's how I feel about it. This thread doesn't belong here and I'll keep down-modding posts accordingly. I'd tell you to take away from my reputation if you disagree, but with 7 rep points you haven't earned that privilege. I, by the grace of God, have 35 rep points to my name and can take away one at a time from people I feel aren't making genuine contributions to the forums.

Yeah because Al-Qaeda has nothing better to do than play around with WingDings font.

I can see it now.

Infidels! I never would have thought of this! Praise be to WingDings!"

I should find one of his old videos and do a voice over. You know, where he's looking into the camera and pointing. Classic.

Call me paranoid, but I hypothesize that at least two of these accounts are owned by the same individual.

Bush hid the facts

Try it with "Wron gfo rum dudes" and I hypothesize you'll witness the same behavior.

Thread necromancy?

Man this was a fun read though. I sympathize with cwarn, though... I tend to believe that "irrational" numbers in general have a weaker correspondence to "reality" - or physical reality, or God's reality, or whatever - than do, say, the integers and the rational numbers.

Not in the sense that the definitions of "irrational" numbers are inconsistent, or that it is impossible to reason about them logically, but in the sense that God created the integers and all the rest is the invention of man.

I suppose the real question, then, is whether there "exist" in a substantive sense integer numbers... I tend to think they probably do, but I admit that I don't have a particularly clear reason for thinking so. Some of the selfsame arguments against cwarn seem to shore up this belief tool; all real circles are just many-sided polygons, after all. And not necessarily regular ones at that.

Eh. Beats me. cwarn sort of reminds me of myself, if I didn't know anything about math.

Your insults would be more effective if you took the time to learn English properly.

You really are cute.

First off, I concur that every man is my master in some respect. I should endeavor to learn as much from him as I can, about that subject. So far the only thing you seem to excel me in is trolling tech forums, and I'm not particularly curious about that today.

Next, it would be silly to get into a contest with you. You have no reason to believe me when I say I have published twice with another on the way, and I wouldn't believe anything you told me. In any event, number of papers is a poor measure of a man's intellect.

If we take this exchange at face value, Narue and I are the masters, you are the pupil, and it is you who is the idiot. In anonymous Internet forums, face value is just about all you have. I suggest you stop making a fool of yourself and wasting everybody's time.

Narue:
At least it looks like I got to one of them. Can you imagine asking a question, being asked to take it elsewhere, and then getting indignant? Beats me. Perhaps it underlines the greater intellectual bankruptcy of modern days. A brave new world indeed.

CoderXpert, try to learn something someday, and come back once you do.

^ Are you sure you'll have to check *every* rectangle? That's not obvious to me, especially given the fact that you can do better than that on the maximum subsequence sum problem, to which this seems related.

I have noticed a few questions popping up from time to time on the subject of formal languages in general, and on regular languages in particular. As I'm pretty bored and enjoy the study of formal languages to a reasonable extent, I thought I might try to give a quick-and-dirty treatment of the subject here. Who knows, maybe somebody will find it useful some day.

If a moderator sees this and feels it is appropriate to move to the Tutorials section, that might not be a bad idea. Then again, that's not my call.

An Introduction to Alphabets, Strings, and Formal Languages

We'll start at the very beginning of the topic of formal languages. What is a formal language? To be prepared to answer this question, we must first introduce a few other concepts with which programmers are likely already familiar, if informally.

We will call an alphabet any finite, non-empty set of symbols. I won't attempt a rigorous definition of symbol here, but don't worry about it, it's usually not too hard to tell what is a symbol and what isn't. I'll be sure to make clear what I'm talking about.

We will call a string over an alphabet any finite sequence of symbols from that alphabet. For notational convenience we will omit braces and commas.

Example: Let the alphabet E be the set of symbols {a, b, c}. One string s over E is (a, b, b, a, c) (from now on, …

^ They probably just emailed hotmail with a friendly request to reset the password to what it was previously.

Simple. Just have a precondition that the algorithm be specified in correct C code.

You can also call main() recursively from anywhere in your program. This could be a good or a terrible idea depending on what you're doing.