Tag Archives: Programming

Life

Programming… still long way to learn…

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Finally, the Big Data programming contest is over!
After a 2 week intensive practice,  our team still achieve 0/12…
It’s real, 0/12!

Is it that hard?
From our experience, Yes!

I believe you played 2048 game before.
An example question is write an AI(Artificial Intelligence) which able to solve 2048 in 1,000,000 move.
Mean the program can auto solve 2048, in any random case.
Here is an example.

In fact we have only 1 year experience in programming~
And we just learn how to deal with school exam…
For sure we can’t handle this kind of question~
Even maybe we can, it will be 1 week but not in 2 hours.

However with the little hope, I still stay until the final round.
Because for me

One failure one experience to success

There is no point for me to giving up such opportunity to gain the experience.

Lastly,
Thanks to my friend introduce such amazing competition to me!
Thanks to my team mate spent 2 weeks together kill our brain cells!
Thanks God for giving me this experience, I’ll learn harder and work harder!

Next time, I’ll make the 0/12 to 6/12, is possible 12/12!

Algorithm

The 3n+1 problem

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Since I have a low budget for Taiwan,
This Big data competition is an opportunity for me, but it also very challenging!

Just like the word, Big Data = Big size data which content main 4 Vs as shows as below:

ibm-big-data
Credit: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/

As software engineer, Our main work is to optimize the 4 Vs when compute the data.
Which mean we have to compute the different kind of large data with high speed and high accuracy.

What make it so challenging is because I just stepped into this field 2 weeks ago, and the algorithm inside is ultimately hard.
Most of them require Artificial Intelligence(AI), and it is my third year course!

Let’s have the most basic example given by the competition organizer——3n+1 problem.

  1. Select a range of data from 1 to 1,000,000 (Eg: 1 to 100)
  2. For every number(n), apply the following rule:
    1. if number is even, divide itself by 2 (n/2)
    2. if number is odd, multiple by 3 and plus 1 (3n+1)
    3. every operation(n/2 or 3n+1) mean 1 cycle.
    4. if the result is not 1, repeat step (a), cycle increase by 1.
    5. if number is 1, stop and continue next number.
  3. Between the range, the program have to display the highest cycle for that particular number.

If you don’t understand, can click here for full question.

As programmer, we’ll normally choose a while loop or a for loop and compute every data.
But since it’s a competition, ordinary solution will just kick you out from the list.

After discussing with friend and some on-line study

the better solution is let the program remember the number of cycle which it already compute before.
Mean, the program will become faster(clever) every time it complete a number.
In another word, an AI program.

So does it make a different? Here is the result:

3n+1

(ignore the wrong answer)
First is a while loop, third is a for loop and last one with memory.

Can you see it such a huge different?
Let scale this up to the real world big data such as Google or FB:

If applying ordinary method,
FB needs 1 minute to load your news feed from database…
With some AI algorithm, the time reduced to 3s for the same operation.
And the beauty of AI is: the more you use, the faster it become!

Now does it make scene for you?

The world’s data is continue growing and expanding.
I believe in the future world, there will be huge demand within this area.
So I really have to start learning now.

However, the example is just an entry question and it already took me a few days to figure it out.
There are still so many things for me to learn.
I hope I can apply AI algorithm in my brain also, the more I learn, the faster I can catch.

Fighting for Exam, Fighting for Big Data, Fighting for Taiwan!