Saturday, September 08, 2007

It's a Sin!

I am spending some of my spare time these days revisiting algorithms: the computer scientists' bread and butter. (Which we tend not to use explicitly in our daily work, since most useful algorithms are part of one standard library or another).

But I am secretly hoping to lure my son (when the time comes) into sciences by showing how rather abstract stuff such as "the shortest path in a weighted, directed graph" applies to computer games, artificial intelligence, and whatnot. So I sat down last night to play with the Dijkstra algorithm, and I wrote this short Python program.

It was most frustrating that I spent one hour working on the bulk of the program, and three hours on solving the trigonometry problem of drawing those little arrow bitches at the end of the graph edges. The F-word came up some many times, I was happy that my son was asleep.

But then again, being five months of age he does not know what that means anyway.

"Let Daddy show you how easy trigonometry is. It's all about f***ing sin and cos".

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