csammis posted:

This is CoC, actually, so I'm going to have to write to your professors and invalidate your thesis immediately

coffeetable posted:

I'm trying to build a primitive election simulator, but one of the things I'm having trouble with is a good way to generate the preference votes: I want them to be "biased" so that some candidates will have a higher ranking on average than others. Anyone know an algorithm for this?

coffeetable posted:

yeah, i'm doing something like this at the moment. unfortunately i'm wanting to generate 2-3 million preference ballots (in batches of a thousand or so, generating a new set of probabilities for each)

coffeetable posted:

Ah, I think I messed up - by preference ballot, I meant a ranking of the candidates by preference, not "tick the candidates you like".

Dominoes posted:

Does anyone know of any resources that track financial news article performance? Doing a Google search for "financial news article track records" doesn't produce relevant results. A random scan of a few financial news articles at any point appears to produce a few vague, but quantifiable predictions over time spans ranging from a week to a year. I'm suspicious that all predictions, including ones from respected sources, are no better than random, since my understanding from statistics is that any better-than-random guess can be leveraged into large profits using derivatives. This includes price changes (or lack-thereof) of any kind.

I'm posting here instead of a finance thread, since I suspect the replies will be less biased. May crosspost later.

Dominoes posted:

Nailed it! It wouldn't be too difficult,

Linear Zoetrope posted:

So I'm getting interested in one of my old projects again: making a deckbuilder for Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories. God Goofy knows why I'd play this game again but I may do it in another playthrough of the series.

So basically, in COM there are sleights you can use to do special attacks, and building a sleight deck is essentially the only tolerable to play the game (in my opinion). Sleights operate on the following principle: you have an ordered (non-shuffled) deck chosen from a larger card list of yours. During combat if you choose an ordered set of 3 cards in the deck whose properties meet some constraint (usually related to something analogous to card "suit" or "color" and sum of the card "ranks"), you permanently remove the first card in the set from combat, temporarily discard cards 2 and 3 (which will be restored next time you go through your deck), and then execute an attack.

The "sleight deck": is basically abusing this mechanic so you can spam the sleight button and win. So for instance, Sonic Blade is a popular sleight for bosses, and to use it you need three cards whose "ranks" (0-9) sum to 20-23 (inclusive), and are all of different "suits" (there are 8 or 9 different attack card suits). So to build a Sonic Blade sleight deck you basically just get out a sheet of paper, write down your cards, and find some order that, for multiple reduction passes discarding the first of 3 cards, the next pass will still have cards that sum between 20-23, and all attack cards are still of different types/suits, for as many passes as possible.

There's also a deck limit, but instead of being number of cards, each card has its own cost and your deck has a cost limit.

A more complex folding sleight, which I only used for the final boss and is a pain to make, is a lethal frame deck. Lethal frame involves specifically the magic card "stop", followed by any two attack cards, rank/suit agnostic. So the trick there is to build the deck so that the first pass is all lethal frames, and then after that it reduces into a normal sleight deck (e.g. Sonic Blade above).

I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas for how to approach this. It seems like a cursed, even harder mashup of the subset sum and knapsack problems since we have 1. a cost limit, 2. the need for subsets to sum to a given range, 3. a hard size of the subset, 4. subsets-of-subsets to consider, 5. order matters, and 6. elements have additional constraints (tags like attack type, magic, etc). I'm leaving out some of the fuzzier constraints you can do when building by hand (e.g. "when we get to the last reduction it's acceptable for me to press left or right once or twice to get more mileage out of the reduction so they don't need to be strictly in order"), because it would just make it even harder. Can anyone think of any strategies for this? The additional constraints break almost every existing DP or approximate solution to subset sum and knapsack I can think of. I'm guessing it'd have to have some sort of heuristic-driven guess and check component because there's absolutely no way to solve it exactly, as well as just hardcoding certain things ("when building this sleight don't even bother to guess cards with value/type <X>"), but the multiple reduction step is the primary thing eluding me. I'm thinking the easiest way would be to build up the "last" reduction first, and then only insert things in the "discard" slots for the higher level, but then there's still the issue of backtracking in case there's a better option.

AgentCow007 posted:

How do you go about converting random bits (like from a hardware RNG) into constrained results? For example if I want to randomly pick from [A-Za-z0-9] (62 values), using 6 bits of random data (64 values), do I have any options besides mod (which would bias the first two characters) or discarding out-of-range values (wasting muh precious entropy)?

Hughmoris posted:

I've been trying to teach myself the basics of git and contributing to open source. I found some typos in a popular repo, submitted my first PR, and they merged it. I'm now listed as a contributer.

I'm assuming I can put this on my resume now?

hbag posted:

i uh
im getting this in python
AttributeError: 'dict' object has no attribute 'descendants'

this makes no sense, i thought dicts did have descendants, that was the whole point
idk heres my code lmao

Python code:

            for post in posts:
                #resp_object[post] = 'wahooo'
                resp_object['cum'].append('wahoo')

neither of these worked

nielsm posted:

KillHour posted:

Well that's a lot easier to answer. First, findAll has been deprecated and moved to find_all:

ultrafilter posted:

This came up in another thread and it's a nice little puzzle:

Here's what I've got so far:

1. Make a guess y_1.
   
2. If that's not right, you have a range of possible years [a, b]. Guess a.
   
3. If the error gets larger, you know you picked the wrong direction, so the range is now [y_1, b]. If it doesn't, you guessed the right direction, so the range is now [a, y_1].
   
4. If the error range you got was the smallest possible, start linearly searching in that range until you get the answer.
   
5. Otherwise, guess the midpoint of your current range and go to step two.
   

Of course, you stop when your guess is right.

Are there any errors I'm not seeing? Is it possible to improve on this?

Computer viking posted:

It also looks fairly easy to use the Google drive API to ask for a copy of a file in a given format, as long as the export stays under 10 MB. Possibly useful if you need to automate this on a schedule, though I don't know how often you need to do an interactive OAuth login.

Computer viking posted:

I'm case you're joking, that does have one officially correct pronunciation, using i as in Linus as pronounced by a Swedish-speaking Finn. He owns the trademark, and while he didn't name it, it is based on his name; he gets to dictate how it should sound.