Programming News and Articles

Can 10 heads in a row really occur in a coin toss? Or, can the lucky numbers in the lottery be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6? We investigate the law of large numbers.

Maddog gives a brief history of the last (almost) half century of *x, plus a call for spreading the love.

If you're looking for a head start on solving the classic Knight's Tour chess challenge, try this homegrown Python script.

At a party with 23 guests, having two guests with the same birthday in more than 50 percent of cases may sound fairly unlikely to amateur mathematicians. Armed with statistical methods, party animal Mike Schilli sets out to prove this claim.

Bash is known for admin utilities and text manipulation tools, but the venerable command shell included with most Linux systems also has some powerful commands for manipulating binary data.

Security vulnerabilities in the kernel often remain undetected. The kernel hacker initiative, Kernel Self-Protection, promotes safe programming techniques to keep attackers off the network, and, if they do slip through the net, mitigate the consequences.

The well-known Monty Hall game show problem can be a rewarding maiden voyage for prospective statisticians. But is it possible to teach a neural network to choose between goats and cars with a few practice sessions?

Compilers translate source code into executable programs and libraries. Inside modern compiler suites, a multistage process analyzes the source code, points out errors, generates intermediate code and tables, rearranges a large amount of data, and adapts the code to the target processor.

Armed with the Audacity sound editor, you can convert the analog content of LPs, tapes, and cassettes to the digital world.