Rendering the Mandelbrot Set

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Code on github.

Per Wikipedia, the Mandelbrot set is the set of complex numbers for which the a particular function does not diverge from the origin when iterated. The particular function is: fc(z) = z2 + c

The important facts are that the space is the complex plane, and the colour-coding normally seen corresponds to the number of iterations required for the new value of c to be seen to diverge (have an absolute value above 4). My code for checking and colouring was:

def iter_score(re, im):
    x = 0
    y = 0
    iters = -1
    while iters < ITERATION_LIMIT and x * x + y * y < 4:
        next_x = x * x - y * y + re
        y = 2 * x * y + im
        x = next_x
        iters += 1
    return iter


def score_colour_map(iter_score):
    grey_val = iter_score
    return [grey_val, grey_val, grey_val]

Could have been more inventive on the colouring, or at least switched the rendering to greyscale. As it is, it’s RGB, but only giving greys:

Main Python note was the issue around getting PyPNG installed so I could “import png”. Perhaps nor surprisingly, it matters which environment is active when you pip-install something. Presumably the environment includes an indicator of which packages are installed (perhaps a directory name?). Anyway, installing a package with the conda environment running doesn’t help when you’re trying to use the package in PyCharm with its own venv! Lesson learned.

Managing External Work

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Someone asked me recently about managing outsourced piecework, where people outside your company are paid by the number of tasks performed. I did this on various projects for over a year with a previous employer. Our trial-and-error approach had quite a few errors, but we did eventually establish a stable system. This is an outline of that successful system, with a few notes about things we tried that didn’t work.

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Riddler, May 15 2020

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Since I’m still learning my way through Jupyter, I tried the Classic as a notebook.

I’m also not sure what the best way to present a notebook is, if I have a WordPress site? The include I used last time wasn’t that great.

For the Express, the best score I can manage is 6. In this grid, there’s no legal place to put a 1 in the top row.

Applied Data Science with Python and Jupyter, Alex Galea, 2018 – Chapter 1

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Basic system for Jupyter is a web front end to little pockets of code that execute on the backend; setup means getting the server running.

Assume this means that each notebook has its own kernel running on the server? Or not running, something more like a session.

Notebooks can be saved out as Python or HTML files.

DataFrames: created by Pandas constructor. Have a describe() method that gives summaries of individual variables. corr() gives a correlation matrix.

Seaborn pairplot: exactly what I wanted when working on reports at VCS – pairwise plots of variables against each other.

ndarray.reshape: reshapes the x-y sizes of an array; param values of -1 for a dimension mean that the correct value is inferred from other values.

sklearn.preprocessing.PolynomialFeatures: returns an object capable of transforming data frames, e.g. with degree of 2, and one-dimensional input the output frame would contain a frame for each input value, containing the value to the powers zero, one and two (i.e. the number one, the input value, and the input value squared).

sklearn.linear_model.LinearRegression: gives an object which can perform linear regression (multi-linear in the example)

There’s a bug in the last section, about categorical features. The cell that starts, “# Color-segmented pair plot” contains this:

sns.pairplot(df[cols], hue='AGE_category',
             hue_order=['Relatively New', 'Relatively Old', 
             'Very Old'], plot_kws={'alpha': 0.5},
             diag_kws={'bins': 30})

But this throws an AttributeError – ‘Line2D’ has no property ‘bins’. Removing the parameter diag_kws={‘bins’: 30} leaves the call running properly.

Jupyter Experiment

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I know all the cool kids have been using it for years. I thought I should give it a try. Currently working through Applied Data Science with Python and Jupyter, but this is not from the book.

The desired output of this is the line graph showing the relationship between average weekly deaths in England and Wales, and weekly deaths this year. This is it:

Deaths per Week, England and Wales

 

So you’re going to be a Penalty Box Timer?

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A couple of weeks ago I worked as a penalty box timer for the Fab Slav roller derby sevens tournament. If you don’t know what roller derby is, this post is not for you. Instead, you should find out!
 
This post is about what I learned of penalty box timing after doing it for the first time. It’s not a substitute for reading the WFTDA docs, being familiar with the sheets you’ll fill in, watching Brain of Terror’s videos, or taking any training that is offered to you.

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Riddler Classic, January 24 2020

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EDIT: Nope! Not far wrong, but definitely wrong.

My strategy of starting with the easy cases and building out to more complex cases was used successfully by other solvers. My analysis of the easy cases was correct, but there was a mistake in the way I built out. My diagram probably didn’t help; the one drawn by the winner didn’t distinguish between the larger and smaller piles, and I think that’s where my error crept in.

For example, when I considered (9, 5), I thought it was a losing position because I didn’t see that taking six coins from the larger pile produced (5, 3), since the larger pile became the smaller pile in that move. So the “simplification” I introduced, of specifying one pile as larger, while not wrong, made it easier for me to make a mistake. It helped to break my mental model by suggesting an identity for the piles (“larger” or “smaller”) that isn’t persistent, but depends on the progress of the game. Will try not to do that again!

EDIT 2: Revised the original spread sheet showing the rows that I had calculated wrongly, and producing a correct game state table.

 

Another week of being fairly confident about this week’s Riddler Classic. (Bolstered by getting exactly the right answer for the last one I did, if by a slightly inefficient method.)

The puzzle is a coin-picking game, with the usual aim of taking the last coins, but the unusual condition of having two coin stacks:

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