Definitions # In a lot of texts regarding compression you will run across various conventions of syntax to describe the coding of data. Much of them are used in fields like automata theory, group theory and statistics. Although, the field of coding theory itself has a long and rich history in the 20st century; much of the terminology is borrowed from fields that gave rise to it.
I was recently working on solving problem 64 for project Euler and one of the needed algorithms was a detection of cycles in a list. This routine works for detecting cycles in lists of cardinality greater than 2.
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I have been working on a game where enemy characters must select a target seemingly at random but such that the distribution of selected targets is balanced. Initially I had come up with a randomization algorithm with weighted values for each target but this became cumbersome and much too complex.
Then I remembered the scheduling algorithms from my Operating Systems class. In particular, the lottery scheduling algorithm.
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