Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nabeelahmed13 4347 days ago
This is at a tangent, but I'm a fresh CS undergrad and this simple explanation really hooked me.

So my question is, where can I find more of this stuff? MOOCs are tough to manage with university, but if I wanted to learn more about these mathematical concepts presented in an interesting way, where should I start looking?

I'm a tad bit indecisive about how good I am with CS theory but I know if I took the leap and mastered some basics I would enjoy it. Any recommendations will help.

3 comments

Dasher http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/ takes some of the Markov chain ideas to the next level. If you are a visual thinker it is a good way to get a feel for probabilistic compression techniques, specifically PPM and arithmetic coding.

Also good is the Viterbi Workshop (EDIT: unfortunately the URL below leads to a broken version of the applet.) http://www.alantro.com/viterbi/workshop.htm It used to have animated Java illustrations of the Viterbi algorithm, mentioned in other comments on this post. There are other working applets out there, e.g. http://www.wirelesscommunication.nl/reference/chaptr05/recei...

The general field is called "algorithm animation" but it seems be out of fashion. The old SRC Modula-3 distribution used to contain a cool package for creating animations of algorithms. Here is a video made by the authors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIgu9q0vVc0

Again a bit of a tangent, but I wrote an essay on learning math on your own based on my experiences: https://medium.com/@amathstudent/learning-math-on-your-own-3... - perhaps it will help you.
the other visualizations on setosa.io are pretty great. There really aren't enough of these around if you ask me. another set of good tutorials that are at this level is Red Blob Games: http://www.redblobgames.com/ focused on games but introduces math/coding concepts very intuitively and in a practical manner.