This update includes a fairly major refactoring of chrss's chess engine. It should make it easier to add new features in the future.
Beyond that the only (noticeable) new feature is that you can now get the Forsyth-Edwards Notation (FEN) for a game. This is a standard format for describing …
After finding some more spare time fivepoundapp.com is now running on Django.
Features that can be seen include an rss feed for the next meetup and some microformats splashed around.
Beyond that the main reason for the move was to gain Django's admin interface. Beats hacking html by hand …
For the same project that I'm using ctypes on OS X I'm also working on a Windows version - again using ctypes for the native interfacing.
In both cases the OS X and Windows specific code does not amount to much (a few hundred lines each, with plenty of spacing). Doing …
This is the third part in my series on the "travelling salesman problem" (TSP). Part one covered defining the TSP and utility code that will be used for the various optimisation algorithms I shall discuss. Part two covered "hill-climbing" (the simplest stochastic optimisation method).
I am currently using ctypes (lets you call native code using only Python - no C) for a project on OS X and ran into a little problem today:
"Illegal instruction"
Not exactly very specific.
Initially I thought this was due to some threading issues, but after ensuring I only had …
So after implementing hill-climbing, I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to use Python's profile module and see what the slow parts of the code were. To do this I set-up a basic hill-climb on the 100 city data set and then called the run method of profile:
import …
This is the second part in my series on the "travelling salesman problem" (TSP). Part one covered defining the TSP and utility code that will be used for the various optimisation algorithms I shall discuss.
This is the first part in my series on the “travelling salesman problem” (TSP). An outline of what I plan to cover can be seen in the prologue.
To kick things off here's a quick quote:
The traveling salesman problem (TSP) asks for the shortest route to visit a collection …
The Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a classic combinatorial optimisation problem. It also happens to be a problem I have spent various parts of my life looking at.
At my first job out of uni we worked on solving real-world problems that usually involved the TSP in some fashion. Often …