The Public Var

The first Millennium Problem I will be exploring is the Poincaré Conjecture. In the early 1900s, a mathematician by the name of Henri Poincaré stated a hypothesis regarding a field called topology. Although many agreed with him, no one could actually prove that his conjecture was true for many decades. Therefore, one of the Millennium Problems became proving or disproving the truth of what became known as the Poincaré Conjecture.

In 2000, the turn of the new millennium, the Clay Mathematics Institute put forth seven unsolved problems in mathematics. These problems represent some of the most difficult conundrums formulated in the past millennium, remaining unsolved despite the numerous decades of brainpower put into them. The Millennium Problems, if solved, would create significant progress in mathematics, computer science, and physics, so much so that the Institute is willing to award a prize of $1,000,000 for each problem solved.

Pong is a rather simple though fascinating game, iconic for being among the first ever video games produced. An astounding achievement for its time, pong is used nowadays as a sort of exercise for acolyte programmers. Everything about it is perfect for beginners, including even a good artificial intelligence implementation. A young coder only needs to crunch out some physics calculations for the computer to play perfect pong. However, what if the computer had no idea how to play pong? Is it possible to train it, for it to build its own code?

For many projects, it is important to use a customized font for the sake of characterization and personalization. However, if you are using OpenFL and Haxe, you will realize that the font they use is always some boring font that everyone has on their computer. In this post, we will look at how to use a custom font in your OpenFL project in a way that will work for as many targets (HTML5, Windows, etc) as possible.

Let's say that you are walking down the halls of a high school, and on a locker you find a rather conspicuous note that reads, "YBIRL BHZHP UYLFD HVFUL ORNEK BKBQN A". Overly curious, you write down the letters and try to find out what they mean while in class. Very quickly, you realize that by shifting each letter by 13 spaces (ie. A becomes N, B becomes O, etc), the message reads, "Love you muchly squishy bear! XOXO ~Dan". Embarrassing!

In the past week, Numberphile, a YouTube channel for math nerds like myself, released a video about a rather interesting numerical challenge that first appeared in a newspaper in 1926. This "Coconut Problem" is a classic puzzle for math students due to the problem's simplicity, yet still requiring a non-trivial method in order to be solved.

Apparently, about a little over a week ago, someone posted the picture of a dress asking others what its colors were. The post managed to go viral since viewers could not agree with each other regarding what they saw. Some saw a blue and black dress, while others saw gold and white. The world erupted into a wild debate, and now only in the aftermath did I take the time to look at the dress myself to see what I saw. But what I saw was somewhat shocking.

Lately, I have been dedicating much of my time to a project for a university class. Now that some of the load has lightened, I thought it would be a good time to post a reflection for one of the earlier projects we had in the class: Solve the Traveling Salesman Problem.

Last year in December, Veritasium (Derek Muller) uploaded an interesting video explaining both the importance of human teachers and why the educational system has remained mostly unchanged over the past centuries. The video, This Will Revolutionize Education, puts to words many of the same thoughts I have personally had about the true role of teachers and the mechanism behind learning. If you have not, I definitely recommend seeing what Muller has to say.

Unlike AS3, Haxe has a feature called type inference that allows you to forgo specifying the types of variables or functions. Instead, Haxe will try and determine the types of variables for you if you leave them unspecified. At first, I was hesitant about taking advantage of this feature since it made me feel more organized when everything was labeled. But, after having used the language for a month, I've come to realize that type inference can really simply your code without losing any information.

Today I introduce the beginning of what I hope will become a well-developed Haxe programming resource: HaxeDev. HaxeDev's mission is to provide fellow Haxe users with as much information about the language as possible.

Haxe shares many similarities with the Actionscript 3 (AS3) language, and therefore AS3 developers like myself can pick it up rather easily. There are, of course, some immediate differences that should be noted if wanting to write Haxe code, and I attempt to note the most important ones here. This post borrows and augments the information found at OpenFL's site.