After my post yesterday I decided that today I would avoid the computer as much as possible. It looks like that was the right thing to do. Tonight I sat down and looked at some notes and it hit me: The reason I was stuck was because I didn’t know what to do next.
So, I began making lists. As soon as things started to appear in a nice neat ordered list, it became apparent what had to be done (and the order to do it in).
A lot of programmers like to just jump into a problem and start coding. Sometimes that’s what is needed, but a lot of times what is needed is a plan (no matter how vague) of where you want to go, and how you plan to get there. A To Do list is a basic type of a plan, and once you start organizing on any level, it tends to snowball until your whole project is encompassed by the plan.
At least that’s what should happen if you want to get things done. A Big Plan is made of many Small Plans. By following through on the small plans, you are following the big plan. I can’t believe I let that wisdom escape me, its so fundamental!
4 comments ↓
this is very interesting. these guys want to use Group Theory to solve Matrix Multiplication at complexity approaching O(n^2).. i don’t believe it. but yet i hope they succeed. have you any algorithm that is fast in doing matrix inversion?
Toward an Optimal Algorithm for Matrix Multiplication
http://www.siam.org/pdf/news/174.pdf
The other day I was looking at a book and there was some talk of matrices in there, I’ll have to go see if I can find it.
good’ol steepest descent, in plain english!
have you heard of the method of Conjugate Gradient Descent? a friend introduced me to this. i found the article easy to grasp and fairly enlightening.
http://cauchy.math.colostate.edu/Resources/SD_CG/index.html
[…] I recently put up my 200th post. I didn’t realize that until the other day while I was looking at something else. I think that’s kinda neat, because when I started this whole blogging thing, I thought it was a little bit goofy, kinda like Doogie Howser writing in his computer journal. (Was Doogie the first blogger???) Anyways, I’m impressed that I’ve been able to come up with 200 things to write about over the last two years or so. […]
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