First Post
I’ve found that writing todo lists enormously increases my productivity while programming. Programming is all about breaking larger problems into smaller problems over and over until the problems are small enough to solve easily. Lists provide a map of the problems that need solving and make it possible to work on a smaller subset of them without having to simultaneously worry about the global structure of the program.
I’d like to learn more about creating computer programs able to play board games; to that end, over the next day or two I’m going to be working on an AI for 8×8 Connect 4 and try to accomplish the following:
- Implement a Minimax algorithm using javascript since game logic and GUI are already written. The heuristic evaluation function will probably count the number of winning moves available to both players.
- Add alpha-beta punning to the Minimax algorithm.
- Create a Monte-Carlo Tree Search algorithm for Connect 4. I’m not currently very familiar with this technique, but based on what I’ve read so far, it looks like it is state of the art.
- Have the programs play each other (with similar run times) and post the results.
Other assorted ideas I’m thinking of trying (updated occasionally):
State population flow
http://ilya.boyandin.me/assets/thesis.pdf Pupyrev et al. parallel flow diagrams look very promising.
Project Gutenberg
Whale words and other text visualizations, both work specific and aggregate
Unfold with mouseover
Submarine cables
- Animate history of them being laid
- Style like an old map
- Use canvas or webGL to show flow of information
Fibonacci numbers
Show computation with recursion, memorization and newtons method
- Turn twitter follow list into a rss feed, export OXML
- Make front end to browse
- http://nuzzel.com/ does a most of this
Oscars, temp over time
Software package usage
The actual hardest shot in bowling
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9177469
- Maybe, the reason for the low success rate on the 4-6-7-9-10 split is because the really good pros rarely end up with it.
- Are strikes streaky?
- Do some players player better when ahead or behind?
- Most lead changes?
- The ‘best’ bowler
Degrees of Duncan
- Every player that’s played with another player
Convex box score points - every player that’s played 20 min+ and scored less than 10
Space debis
python v r data analysis
clojurescript/om demo
Server side code
- Boardgames
- Working git server with preview
waterlines
cartography w/ nba or game positions
Stretching and shrinking time
- Speakers
- Spoofing
- Oscars
- signed distance field
- jetpack
- starterkit
- graph-scroll
- swoopy/annotations
Difference between playoff and regular season win rates
- Cubs got swept in playoffs after sweeping during season
Ship logs
Number of seconds with a lead v chance of winning
- Which series/team/game had the most come from behind wins?
- Are win probably numbers calibrated correctly? Pats win percentage seemed low!
Hilbert Scope
Radial Sunrise map
Log scales are pretty great!
Which team is the best at 2-1?
Distance between two people
- export google location log as a KML, plot a connected scatter plot of lat dist v long dist
- Bump chart with 5 people?
2016 in everyone’s graphics
- scrape everyone’s graphics twitter accounts and find uniq url
- compare colors
- look at election graphics
- Take reddit notes and throw in one post
play by play
- Most boring playoffs ever, how many minutes was each champion behind?
- link to reddit comments and nlp. which player is the most exciting?
- During a rare happy stretch of Philly’s blowout loss to the Hawks on Friday, the Sixers’ broadcast team pointed out that Philly was on “an 8-3 run.” I know the Sixers aren’t good enough to put together normal NBA runs, but an 8-3 scoring gap is not a run. It is a randomly occurring blip that happens every game.
- Which players are the streakest/have the most improbable runs? www.espn.com/nba/story/_/page/presents-19573519/heating-fire-klay-thompson-truth-hot-hand-nba
- Which players do the best/worst after hiting/missing a FT? Do some players always go 7/10 or do some go 5/10 and 10/10 more often than they would randomly.
- What’s the closest game ever? Has any game stayed within 10 points? 5 points?
- Which game had the shortest scoring streak?
Longest time between released league of legends skins / champs
Bump chart of living presidents
- when does a year start? you draw it
Chart people’s position overtime
- map overlay
- connected scatter plot showing distance, something weird like the time event thing
- how far has the baby been from how?
- how often does our family get together?
tensorflow astronomy images to find stars that look like other things
Live Life dashboard
- weight/heart rate/steps (not sure if fitbit can be exported?)
- mouse/keyboard
- active applications
- git commits
- location (chrome location? android app?)
- 3d prolly
Change in enforcement?
- download video files and track camera position over time
- biggest come back? have pros gotten better at closing out?
- champion pool size across different tournments/players. can we see the meta shifting during a tournment? which teams make the “weirdest” picks?
- which players have the deepest champ pools
- pull all challenger data and try win prob over time model
- 255 job scatter plot, but made of line charts of gold differential for each team. bucket by game end time and stack by win/loss. looking for a more detailed way of showing win % when ahead by 500/1000/1500 gold at 10/15/20 minutes
- every flame horizon
- most deaths by a player in tk tk minutes
- % win chance after losing an inhib, having two inhibs or three inhibs down at once. best comebacks every?
- best baron (# towers?) / worst baron
- blank and untara had huge winning streaks after MSI… best ever?
- which teams play better when they are down a game/reverse sweep most
- roster time lines (might be too many players? just look at teams?)
Structure of fiction
No Thanks
- online (rtc)
- bots. monte carlo tree seach, nets?
Dodgers win streak
- 43 of 50 games… how common is that?
- Spurs 18 seasons of 50 plus wins
CTA map
Encoding line width
Hapax Legomena
Flappy Beep
webcam showing layers
delaunay-triangulation
Kelly betting
Word memes on Hackernews
- How often do people say: “A junior developer makes a mistake that cost the company 10 million dollars. He walks into the office of Tom Watson, the CEO, expecting to get fired. “Fire you?” Mr Watson asked. “I just spent 10 million educating you.””
- “I don’t want unlucky people working here”
- Rich people buy boots that last years, poor people buy boots that wear out after a few months.
- Tap a machine and charge $100. I charge $1 for the tap, $99 for knowing where to tap.
- I remember reading an old parable about a woman who always cut off the ends of her meatloaf before serving it. At one point someone asked her why she did that, and she said that her mother had always done it that way. So she went to ask her mother, and got the same answer. The two of them went to the woman’s grandmother who said that the serving plate she cooked the meatloaf was too small, so she cut off the ends to make it fit.
- “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”
- The paper gets things I know about totally wrong, but I trust them on everything else From Michael Crichton?
- “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
- “little know” tips on reddit
- https://tinysubversions.com/stuff/known-places/
- every “there’s always a tweet”, connections between original date and rt
What does reddit repeat?
Spurs 50 win streak
DISSOLVING THE FERMI PARADOX
3d animation thinger
Winning by at least 17 after Q1 -> final margin of victory
animated illusions
rotating vector field
zoom into a pixel looping forever
most popular canceled show
continuity
- don’t like looking at ads to listen to music!
- why?
- new pornographer low density screenshot
-
weather charts
- https://weatherspark.com/
- a map with showing them in a tooltip?
- two of them showing 5% hottest and 95% hottest. and you can adjust the width of the spread
- show the actual hourly values for a given year
aita
year end slug consistency
Bulls are 1-16 v teams with a winning record and in 9th seed
LeBron beat Kemba 28 times in a row
Lebron hit 5 threes in a few minutes
- fastest streak of shots?
- longest streak of no misses?
- longest streak of no one else shooting?
visual snakes and ladders
Best winning streak of a time period
- color by win rate or min wins a season
- spurs made playoffs / 50 wins forever
hyper cube portfolio page
usable spiral portfolio
- add sidebar of things (maybe horizontal on mobile?)
- hover highlights square
zoomable dorling cartogram
are cow’s actually better repped in the senate?
Airbnb lawsuits over time
d3 learning
- update to v6
- link to others?
- separate from projects
chicago neighborhoods
chart podcast audio
chart TAL replays
- air date v show index scatter plot is obv, but swoopy lines would be fun too
- diff transcripts to show updates
local observable
umap of amazon review for a product
- color by date
- “When we become aware of negative changes, we investigate and often retest to determine whether we need to update our recommendation. For example, staff writer Sarah Witman looks for patterns: If one review mentions an issue with an item’s handle, for example, she’ll search for other reviews with the keyword “handle” to see if the issue is isolated or if it seems to be part of a trend—a good strategy for reviewers and readers alike”
- https://thewirecutter.com/blog/why-some-picks-have-bad-reviews/
- filter by score / length / fakespot
codenames embeddings
- looking at CLS token delta might be better than comparing raw word embedding
- maybe look at early layer?
every bitcoin explanation
commute v. cost
hacker news reposts
scotus wars
stock returns
Momentum transition
- https://blocks.roadtolarissa.com/1wheel/54f90245720d7e3210cea1edfa42089b
- it isn’t a change in like absolute capacity, but i’m really interested in interfaces that don’t gate interaction behind animation - don’t think my version is there yet, but you can start using tools in totally different ways if there isn’t latency.
- 538 game theory
- wsj stock picker
- propublica immigration slider
Multi dimensional arraybuffers for js
forecast outliers
track flair changes on subreddits
umap + oeis
Animal pictures
Basketball WP by margin
NBA team changes
- Zion is now the longest tenured Pelican
- Is there, like, a knicks team made up mostly of former suns players or something like that?
- Which team has had a player for the longest? Which team has had the lowest % returning players ever?
RCP polling
Citibike
Distribution of gymnastics ages over time
weatherspark
Covid polarization but with bars
Rewrite NYT webheadline as a print
Has the NYT stopped reviewing as many off broadway shows?
LeBron Point Record
- Show every season as a grid games, color by points or other things
- NYT/WaPo did vertical lines which aren’t readable (he’s played 1421 games!)
LeBron reddit nick names
Smushed Voroni
“One-dimensional” is a slight misnomer: the pointerX and pointerY transforms consider distance in both dimensions, but the distance along the non-dominant dimension is divided by 100.
https://observablehq.com/plot/interactions/pointer
