dr_tectonic: (Portrait-y)
[personal profile] dr_tectonic
My work computer churned out 16,000 runs of the game this weekend, so I had enough data to figure out how to balance the hazard scores properly today. Got a bunch of stuff tweaked, left it running more for tomorrow so I can compare the changes.

I did lots of probability calculations today. Probability is such a useful thing to understand, and important to so many disciplines, that I'm surprised it's not taught more widely in highschool. I'm really glad I took Prof. Rota's probability course my senior year at MIT. (Although, most of the other students seemed to have had at least a little bit of exposure to it, so maybe it's just my secondary education that was totally lacking.)

Today's I-hate-java rant: whoever thought that we still needed to have both floats and doubles as a core part of the language needs to be beaten with a stick. There should be integers and non-integer numbers, and if anybody needs something more complicated, they should use a special package that lets them decide how many bytes of memory to use to represent each number. Compiler errors that claim no matching signature could be found because "0.2" is a double and not a float fill me with homicidal rage.

Date: 2005-06-14 04:03 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dr-tectonic.livejournal.com
It's all just clever ways of counting things up and dividing by the total. The only hard part is figuring out what the right way of counting is.

Date: 2005-06-15 08:00 am (UTC)
dpolicar: (Default)
From: [personal profile] dpolicar
Sure, but some ways are faster than others.
And things like analyses of variance are best not rederived from first principles.