http://blog.finiteimprobability.com Just programming and math, no spontaneously jumping undergarments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:20:11 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Our last version of this project was a bit ... underwhelming. The Lambda Calculus is Turing-equivalent, but it's hard to imagine expressing much in the way of interesting computations with what we have right now. In fact, we can't, since our calculator is missing the most important tool of the Lambda Calculus: functions. In this ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2009/12/03/lambda-calculus-compiler-part-iii-first-order-functions/ Rather than dive entirely into working on a compiler, I'm going to approach the task in pieces. This post will go over how the Haskell LLVM bindings work while creating support for computing algebraic expressions. The next post will cover first-order functions, with closures to follow. This calculator will be a standalone program that takes ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2009/11/25/lambda-calculus-compiler-part-ii-wading-in-with-arithmetic/ In this series of posts, I'm going to walk through building a compiler for a simple Lambda Calculus to llvm. I'll try to keep things to the point that nothing more than a general understanding of Haskell, Parsec, and the basic concepts of LLVM are required. If you'd like to follow along, this post ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2009/11/17/a-compiler-for-lambda-calculus-to-llvm-part-1/ I promised I would give a bit more in the way of details on the ray tracer. Here they are. During the last three weeks of the term we were directed to come up with a "term project" for the functional programming course. [1] We needed to come up with something ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2009/06/18/experience-writing-a-ray-tracer-in-haskell/ 199 Lines of Haskell, about 30 hours of work. My first ever ray tracer! My first ever considerable Haskell program! Runs in parallel for ~40% speedup. More details to come. [gallery link="file"] http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2009/06/05/one-of-my-term-projects/ Wow, a lot happened last month. Since this term for school is coming to a close, the work involved is piling up. As such I haven't really been able to get much done for my projects. In addition to that, I started an internship at the very end of the ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2009/03/06/march-in-summary/ This is a repost of something I wrote for the forums. Now that it's lost to that refuse heap I thought it could also wait out its days in solitude here. If you haven't played the video game "Left 4 Dead", this will probably be just about unintelligible. It's understandable that ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2009/02/02/left-4-dead-tank-misconceptions/ I'm going to try and keep up with what I've done towards these resolutions at the end of each month. Hopefully this will help me stay on task. Here's what I've done so far: On the game development front: I spent a bit of time this month trying to come up with ways to ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2009/01/28/resolutions-update-one-month/ After spending some time thinking about what is going wrong with this game, I came to two conclusions: Repl-based development doesn't work for me. I ended up spending a lot of time working my way into an inconsistent game state without know it, so most of my time savings were spent figuring out how ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2009/01/07/ive-lost-my-mind/ Well, it's that time of the year and I'm joining in the fray as well. Here's my (hopefully not entirely empty) set of promises for the year. I don't know who would actually find this interesting, but it's helpful to me. Learn Haskell: This was on the list last year, and still hasn't happened to my satisfaction. ... http://blog.finiteimprobability.com/2009/01/02/new-years-resolutions/