Sunday, June 23, 2024

Jhereg

Stephen Brust's Jhereg jumped to the top of the TBR queue because of Cory Doctorow's strong recommendation. It didn't hit any sweet spots for me: it was a quick ~230 pages of fantasy, told in first-person by an assassin, in a fantasy world with sorcery and witchcraft and Dragaerans (descriptions render these more human than the name would suggest). There were action sequences and preparation scenes and scheming and thousand-year internecine feuds. No plot twists were surprising, although the narration chose at many points to casually reveal things that shifted the entire world-building operation (for example, at one point --- and this is not much of a spoiler --- it is revealed that death is not particularly permanent, and in fact is just a way of sending a snippy message to your enemies).

I might read the next book in the series, but it's low-priority. There's a new Jasper Fforde book out! And I still haven't read the sequel to Hild!


This post's theme word is gegg (v intr / noun), "to play a hoax or practical joke; a trick or practical joke." In a world where magic is a daily practice, there is a breadth of possible geggs.

Sunday, May 5, 2024

Jokes about algorithms

 I ask students to write me a joke about algorithms pretty regularly. I like seeing what they come up with...

  • What did one cross-country star algorithm say to the other?
    "It's run time."
  • Teacher: Write me an algorithm that runs in constant time.
    Student: Ok, the first part of my algorithm iterates over a list...
  • What's the runtime of log?
    Nothing. Logs can't run.
  • When in doubt, O(n!).
  • What did the polynomial function say to the exponential function to get it to go away?
    "Beeg-O(n)!" [joke included a visual of an xy graph of poly and exp functions diverging with speech bubbles]
  • "Knock knock"
    "Who's there?"
    "The Gale-Shapley Algorithm"
    "That joke wasn't funny"
    "I guess you aren't a good match for my humor!"
  • Two engineers are stuck on whether to use BFS or DFS for a problem.
    Eng 1: Should we use BFS instead? Because we tried DFS and we're stuck?
    Eng 2: The real queue is why did I choose this career?
  • A 1-day-old great dane talking to a 1-day-old toy poodle
    poodle: I'm bigger than you haha!
    great dane: I"m not worried I am Ω(you)
  • Knock knock... Boom bruteforce algorithm

Algorithms puns:

  • Dancer to Algorithms: "Wow algo! You really have rithm!"
  • Why did Lila hate the orchestra concert?
    Because they didn't have any algo-rhythm!
  • What did Lila play on the drums?
    An algo-rhythm
  • What type of music do computer scientists listen to?
    Algo-rhythm-ic Music
  • Mr. Merge, Mr. Selection, and Ms. Bubble all joined the Annual Sorting Dance Competition. Can you guess who won?
    Mr. Merge won! How? Because he had the best sorting algo-rhythm :)!
  • If my name was algo and I did music they'd call me algo-rhythm!
Regarding graphs:
  • What's the bakery's favorite algorithm?
    "Bread"th first search
  • BreadFirstSearch, no rice no pasta!
  • How do we know that topsort vertices prefer the heat?
    They have to leave once they reach 0 in-degrees.
  • What did Dijkstra say to Kruskal?
    Why you so greedy
  • What kind of search do you prefer?
    DFS, I like my algorithms with a little more depth to them. * badum tzzzz *
  • What did BFS say to DFS? Nothing. Algorithms can't talk.
  • Why did the edge cross the cut?
    Since it had to provide the shortest path :(

This post's theme word is capacitate (v tr), "to make capable." Studying computer science does not capacitate one for comedy.