Progress report for week 51

The DECS project report is complete and has been delivered for evaluation. The report can also be downloaded from the link below. I’ll also add some work units to the BOINC server soon, so that people can try it out.

If you happen to need software for plotting I highly recommend gnuplot. I also tried R for a few hours, but that is a chapter in my life I would rather forget. gnuplot lets me do exactly what I needed in a few simple steps, which is more than I can say about R. It might be because the documentation for gnuplot is so exellent or because there are so many good tutorials, but I managed to whip up a couple of graphs in no time at all. If you want some work done, and you want it done now then gnuplot is your friend.

BTW, this is probably the last DECS progress report as well. At least on this website. At least for now :)

Jan Magne,
Over and out

NOTE: This post has been imported from my old it’s learning ePortfolio DECS blog.

Progress report for week 50

A new draft of the report is complete. This time all the chapters are in place and all the “??” references has been eliminated.

The following is a list of modifications made to chapter 1 and 2:

• Fixed typos and minor word and sentence bugs.
• Moved first paragraph of Section 2.1 to Chapter 1.
• Added reason for redifining ‘one’ to ‘non-zero’ (disambiguation) in second paragraph of Section 2.1.
• Added reduced and identical matrix disambiguation in Section 2.1.
• Fixed notation ambiguity at the end of Section 2.1.
• Added a bit about backtracking in the third paragraph of Section 2.2.
• DeKnuthified some of the content.
• Added formal definition of exact cover to section 2.1. (Does it confuse more than it helps?)
• Added some information and a couple of illustrations about n-queens to the introduction.
• Added n-queens example with primary and secondary columns in Section 2.1.1. It also makes use of the formal exact cover definition.

Pluss the addition of the chapters about implementation, testing and simulation and the conclusion.

NOTE: This post has been imported from my old it’s learning ePortfolio DECS blog.

Progress report for week 49

The report is comming along nicely. It is currently undergoing revision and is expected to be done by the deadline the 20. December.

Inspired by a comment by Hein Meling I put together some notes on how the Dancing Links algorithm could be made non-recursive (read: neither recursive nor iterative). It was more of a side comment from his side, but I’m prone to fall for nerd sniping so this is nothing new.

The BOINC server for the project is now available for the public. It’s not really production ready yet, but take a look if you’re interested.

NOTE: This post has been imported from my old it’s learning ePortfolio DECS blog.

Progress report for week 48

Lots and lots and lots and lots of work on the report :)

The report is coming along nicely. A draft of the first two chapters is available here. I only added the beginning as that is more or less stabilized. The rest of the report is still undergoing some significant changes so I choose not to include those chapters yet. There are some “??” references which didn’t resolve because the sections they refer to are not included. For the moment you can just ignore them.

NOTE: This post has been imported from my old it’s learning ePortfolio DECS blog.