Here is a tune I wrote called “Standard Deviation” done as an accompaniment track using MMA. This is a very simplistic interpretation that makes no use of dynamics, variations in the BossaNova Groove, or even decent repeat logic. But it compiles.
Slightly Greater than one Standard Deviation from the Mean:
Saxophone is a solo instrument. Unless you are into the sounds of Saxophone multiphonics, harmony requires playing with some other instrument. For Jazz, this tends to be a rhythms section of Piano, Bass, and Drums. As a kid, my practicing (without a live Rhythm section) required playing along with pre-recordings of tunes. I had my share of Jamie Aebersold records.
Nowadays, the tool of choice for most Jazz muscians, myself included is iReal Pro. A lovely little app for the phone. All of the Real Book tunes have their chord progressions been posted and generated. The format is simple enough.
But it is a proprietary app. While I continue to support and use it, I am also looking for alternatives that let me get more involved. One such tool is Musical MIDI Accompaniment. I’m just getting started with it, and I want to keep my notes here.
Continue readingLook back at our Pushing Keystone over the Edge presentation from the OpenStack Summit. Many of the points we make are problems faced by any application trying to scale across multiple datacenters. Cassandra is a database designed to deal with this level of scale. So Cassandra may well be a better choice than MySQL or other RDBMS as a datastore to Keystone. What would it take to enable Cassandra support for Keystone?
Continue readingYou might be thinking that this is a long solved problem. I think I have something a little bit different.
This is very similar to the C++ based one that I wrote long ago.
Continue readingIf you are going to write a Sudoku solver, write a brute force, depth first search. You can get it running fast enough.
But what if you couldn’t? What if the puzzles were so big that solving them by brute force was not computationally feasible? A Sudoku puzzle is build on a basis of 3: The Blocks are 3X3, there are 3X 3 of them in the puzzle, and the rows and columns are are 9 cells (3 * 3) long. This approach scales up. If you were to do a basis of 4, you could use the Hexadecimal digits, and have 16 X 16 puzzles.
A Basis of K leads to a puzzle size of (K^4). The basis can be any integer. A Basis of 10 would lead to a puzzle size of 1000.
The Sudoku puzzle shows exponential growth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_explosion#Sudoku
What could you do for a complex puzzle? Use heuristics to reduce the problem set to the point where a the brute force algorithm can complete.
Continue reading