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  • fast way for finding GUIDs.

    - by Behrooz
    hi. I have lots(+2000) of GUIDs(in some network class) and my program must find one of them when it receives a message and do the job associated with it. the positive point is i have a hard-code generator, but the fastest way is my goal(and i don't know how to implement it). my code should do something like this: switch(received guid) { case guid1: do job 1; break; case guid2: do job 2; break; case guid3: do job 3; break; case guid4: do job 4; break; .... }

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  • Finding the Source Line of a function call

    - by Robert
    I've built a custom logging utility which displays a Log Message and the DateTime. I would like to add the line number in the source code which called the function. Is there a way to determine which line of the HTML source a particular javascript function was fired?

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  • Finding an odd perfect number

    - by Coin Bird
    I wrote these two methods to determine if a number is perfect. My prof wants me to combine them to find out if there is an odd perfect number. I know there isn't one(that is known), but I need to actually write the code to prove that. The issue is with my main method. I tested the two test methods. I tried debugging and it gets stuck on the number 5, though I can't figure out why. Here is my code: public class Lab6 { public static void main (String[]args) { int testNum = 3; while (testNum != sum_of_divisors(testNum) && testNum%2 != 0) testNum++; } public static int sum_of_divisors(int numDiv) { int count = 1; int totalDivisors = 0; while (count < numDiv) if (numDiv%count == 0) { totalDivisors = totalDivisors + count; count++; } else count++; return totalDivisors; } public static boolean is_perfect(int numPerfect) { int count = 1; int totalPerfect = 0; while (totalPerfect < numPerfect) { totalPerfect = totalPerfect + count; count++; } if (numPerfect == totalPerfect) return true; else return false; } }

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  • Recursive solution to finding patterns

    - by user2997162
    I was solving a problem on recursion which is to count the total number of consecutive 8's in a number. For example: input: 8801 output: 2 input: 801 output: 0 input: 888 output: 3 input: 88088018 output:4 I am unable to figure out the logic of passing the information to the next recursive call about whether the previous digit was an 8. I do not want the code but I need help with the logic. For an iterative solution, I could have used a flag variable, but in recursion how do I do the work which flag variable does in an iterative solution. Also, it is not a part of any assignment. This just came to my mind because I am trying to practice coding using recursion.

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  • Finding the type of an object in C++

    - by lemnisca
    I have a class A and another class that inherits from it, B. I am overriding a function that accepts an object of type A as a parameter, so I have to accept an A. However, I later call functions that only B has, so I want to return false and not proceed if the object passed is not of type B. What is the best way to find out which type the object passed to my function is?

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  • Python finding index in a array

    - by NIH
    I am trying to see if a company from a list of companies is in a line in a file. If it is I utilize the index of that company to increment a variable in another array. The following is my python code. I keep getting the following error: AttributeError: 'set' object has no attribute 'index'. I cannot figure out what is going wrong and think the error is the line that is surrounded by **. companies={'white house black market', 'macy','nordstrom','filene','walmart'} positives=[0 for x in xrange(len(companies))] negatives=[0 for x in xrange(len(companies))] for line in f: for company in companies: if company in line.lower(): words=tokenize.word_tokenize(line) bag=bag_of_words(words) classif=classifier.classify(bag) if classif=='pos': **indice =companies.index(company)** positives[indice]+=1 elif classif=='neg': **indice =companies.index(company)** negatives[indice]+=1

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  • Need help finding a unique value in array

    - by bardockyo
    My code is complete minus one little flaw. It searches the array and prints out which values are unique, however it always counts the first entry as unique even if it is followed by the same value. Can anyone look at my code and tell me which part is messing this up because it is driving me crazy. #include <stdio.h> #define size 7 int main(void) { int array1[size], target, answer, found, x, k, prev, count =1, i; printf("Please input %d integers: ", size); scanf("%d", &target); for(x = 0; x < size; x++) { scanf("%d", &array1[x]); } prev = array1[0]; for (i = 1; i < size; i++) { if (array1[i] == prev) { count++; } else { if (count < 2) printf("%d=%d\n", prev, count); prev = array1[i]; count = 1; } } if (count < 2) { printf("%d=%d\n", prev, count); } return 0; }

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  • What does path finding in internet routing do and how is it different from A*?

    - by alan2here
    Note: If you don't understand this question then feel free to ask clarification in the comments instead of voting down, it might be that this question needs some more work at the moment. I've been directed here from the Stack Excange chat room Root Access because my question didn't fit on Super User. In many aspects path finding algorithms like A star are very similar to internet routing. For example: A node in an A* path finding system can search for a path though edges between other nodes. A router that's part of the internet can search for a route though cables between other routers. In the case of A*, open and closed lists are kept by the system as a whole, sepratly from any individual node as well as each node being able to temporarily store a state involving several numbers. Routers on the internet seem to have remarkable properties, as I understand it: They are very performant. New nodes can be added at any time that use a free address from a finite (not tree like) address space. It's real routing, like A*, there's never any doubling back for example. Similar IP addresses don't have to be geographically nearby. The network reacts quickly to changes to the networks shape, for example if a line is down. Routers share information and it takes time for new IP's to be registered everywhere, but presumably every router doesn't have to store a list of all the addresses each of it's directions leads most directly to. I'm looking for a basic, general, high level description of the algorithms workings from the point of view of an individual router. Does anyone have one? I presume public internet routers don't use A* as the overheads would be to large, and scale to poorly. I also presume there is a single method worldwide because it seems as if must involve a lot of transferring data to update and communicate a reasonable amount of state between neighboring routers. For example, perhaps the amount of data that needs to be stored in each router scales logarithmically with the number of routers that exist worldwide, the detail and reliability of the routing is reduced over increasing distances, there is increasing backtracking involved in parts of the network that are less geographically uniform or maybe each router really does perform an A* style search, temporarily maintaining open and closed lists when a packet arrives.

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  • What services exist for finding someone specific to then run your own peer to peer software with?

    - by psr
    If you give people peer to peer software (such as a web sockets application if the peer to peer part gets implemented, but could be anything) the first step for some kinds of applications is to find a specific person and try to connect with them. If neither of you has a URI (and knows what it is) you need a third party to handle finding each other and verifying your identities. After that the third party isn't needed because you go peer to peer. I could of course write that third party software and put it up on a website, but then I would have to write that third party software and put it up on a website (or a server that isn't a website if that's how I want to do it). Does anyone offer this service? Ideally as a website and of course ideally free.

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  • C#/.NET &ndash; Finding an Item&rsquo;s Index in IEnumerable&lt;T&gt;

    - by James Michael Hare
    Sorry for the long blogging hiatus.  First it was, of course, the holidays hustle and bustle, then my brother and his wife gave birth to their son, so I’ve been away from my blogging for two weeks. Background: Finding an item’s index in List<T> is easy… Many times in our day to day programming activities, we want to find the index of an item in a collection.  Now, if we have a List<T> and we’re looking for the item itself this is trivial: 1: // assume have a list of ints: 2: var list = new List<int> { 1, 13, 42, 64, 121, 77, 5, 99, 132 }; 3:  4: // can find the exact item using IndexOf() 5: var pos = list.IndexOf(64); This will return the position of the item if it’s found, or –1 if not.  It’s easy to see how this works for primitive types where equality is well defined.  For complex types, however, it will attempt to compare them using EqualityComparer<T>.Default which, in a nutshell, relies on the object’s Equals() method. So what if we want to search for a condition instead of equality?  That’s also easy in a List<T> with the FindIndex() method: 1: // assume have a list of ints: 2: var list = new List<int> { 1, 13, 42, 64, 121, 77, 5, 99, 132 }; 3:  4: // finds index of first even number or -1 if not found. 5: var pos = list.FindIndex(i => i % 2 == 0);   Problem: Finding an item’s index in IEnumerable<T> is not so easy... This is all well and good for lists, but what if we want to do the same thing for IEnumerable<T>?  A collection of IEnumerable<T> has no indexing, so there’s no direct method to find an item’s index.  LINQ, as powerful as it is, gives us many tools to get us this information, but not in one step.  As with almost any problem involving collections, there are several ways to accomplish the same goal.  And once again as with almost any problem involving collections, the choice of the solution somewhat depends on the situation. So let’s look at a few possible alternatives.  I’m going to express each of these as extension methods for simplicity and consistency. Solution: The TakeWhile() and Count() combo One of the things you can do is to perform a TakeWhile() on the list as long as your find condition is not true, and then do a Count() of the items it took.  The only downside to this method is that if the item is not in the list, the index will be the full Count() of items, and not –1.  So if you don’t know the size of the list beforehand, this can be confusing. 1: // a collection of extra extension methods off IEnumerable<T> 2: public static class EnumerableExtensions 3: { 4: // Finds an item in the collection, similar to List<T>.FindIndex() 5: public static int FindIndex<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, Predicate<T> finder) 6: { 7: // note if item not found, result is length and not -1! 8: return list.TakeWhile(i => !finder(i)).Count(); 9: } 10: } Personally, I don’t like switching the paradigm of not found away from –1, so this is one of my least favorites.  Solution: Select with index Many people don’t realize that there is an alternative form of the LINQ Select() method that will provide you an index of the item being selected: 1: list.Select( (item,index) => do something here with the item and/or index... ) This can come in handy, but must be treated with care.  This is because the index provided is only as pertains to the result of previous operations (if any).  For example: 1: // assume have a list of ints: 2: var list = new List<int> { 1, 13, 42, 64, 121, 77, 5, 99, 132 }; 3:  4: // you'd hope this would give you the indexes of the even numbers 5: // which would be 2, 3, 8, but in reality it gives you 0, 1, 2 6: list.Where(item => item % 2 == 0).Select((item,index) => index); The reason the example gives you the collection { 0, 1, 2 } is because the where clause passes over any items that are odd, and therefore only the even items are given to the select and only they are given indexes. Conversely, we can’t select the index and then test the item in a Where() clause, because then the Where() clause would be operating on the index and not the item! So, what we have to do is to select the item and index and put them together in an anonymous type.  It looks ugly, but it works: 1: // extensions defined on IEnumerable<T> 2: public static class EnumerableExtensions 3: { 4: // finds an item in a collection, similar to List<T>.FindIndex() 5: public static int FindIndex<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, Predicate<T> finder) 6: { 7: // if you don't name the anonymous properties they are the variable names 8: return list.Select((item, index) => new { item, index }) 9: .Where(p => finder(p.item)) 10: .Select(p => p.index + 1) 11: .FirstOrDefault() - 1; 12: } 13: }     So let’s look at this, because i know it’s convoluted: First Select() joins the items and their indexes into an anonymous type. Where() filters that list to only the ones matching the predicate. Second Select() picks the index of the matches and adds 1 – this is to distinguish between not found and first item. FirstOrDefault() returns the first item found from the previous clauses or default (zero) if not found. Subtract one so that not found (zero) will be –1, and first item (one) will be zero. The bad thing is, this is ugly as hell and creates anonymous objects for each item tested until it finds the match.  This concerns me a bit but we’ll defer judgment until compare the relative performances below. Solution: Convert ToList() and use FindIndex() This solution is easy enough.  We know any IEnumerable<T> can be converted to List<T> using the LINQ extension method ToList(), so we can easily convert the collection to a list and then just use the FindIndex() method baked into List<T>. 1: // a collection of extension methods for IEnumerable<T> 2: public static class EnumerableExtensions 3: { 4: // find the index of an item in the collection similar to List<T>.FindIndex() 5: public static int FindIndex<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, Predicate<T> finder) 6: { 7: return list.ToList().FindIndex(finder); 8: } 9: } This solution is simplicity itself!  It is very concise and elegant and you need not worry about anyone misinterpreting what it’s trying to do (as opposed to the more convoluted LINQ methods above). But the main thing I’m concerned about here is the performance hit to allocate the List<T> in the ToList() call, but once again we’ll explore that in a second. Solution: Roll your own FindIndex() for IEnumerable<T> Of course, you can always roll your own FindIndex() method for IEnumerable<T>.  It would be a very simple for loop which scans for the item and counts as it goes.  There’s many ways to do this, but one such way might look like: 1: // extension methods for IEnumerable<T> 2: public static class EnumerableExtensions 3: { 4: // Finds an item matching a predicate in the enumeration, much like List<T>.FindIndex() 5: public static int FindIndex<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, Predicate<T> finder) 6: { 7: int index = 0; 8: foreach (var item in list) 9: { 10: if (finder(item)) 11: { 12: return index; 13: } 14:  15: index++; 16: } 17:  18: return -1; 19: } 20: } Well, it’s not quite simplicity, and those less familiar with LINQ may prefer it since it doesn’t include all of the lambdas and behind the scenes iterators that come with deferred execution.  But does having this long, blown out method really gain us much in performance? Comparison of Proposed Solutions So we’ve now seen four solutions, let’s analyze their collective performance.  I took each of the four methods described above and run them over 100,000 iterations of lists of size 10, 100, 1000, and 10000 and here’s the performance results.  Then I looked for targets at the begining of the list (best case), middle of the list (the average case) and not in the list (worst case as must scan all of the list). Each of the times below is the average time in milliseconds for one execution as computer over the 100,000 iterations: Searches Matching First Item (Best Case)   10 100 1000 10000 TakeWhile 0.0003 0.0003 0.0003 0.0003 Select 0.0005 0.0005 0.0005 0.0005 ToList 0.0002 0.0003 0.0013 0.0121 Manual 0.0001 0.0001 0.0001 0.0001   Searches Matching Middle Item (Average Case)   10 100 1000 10000 TakeWhile 0.0004 0.0020 0.0191 0.1889 Select 0.0008 0.0042 0.0387 0.3802 ToList 0.0002 0.0007 0.0057 0.0562 Manual 0.0002 0.0013 0.0129 0.1255   Searches Where Not Found (Worst Case)   10 100 1000 10000 TakeWhile 0.0006 0.0039 0.0381 0.3770 Select 0.0012 0.0081 0.0758 0.7583 ToList 0.0002 0.0012 0.0100 0.0996 Manual 0.0003 0.0026 0.0253 0.2514   Notice something interesting here, you’d think the “roll your own” loop would be the most efficient, but it only wins when the item is first (or very close to it) regardless of list size.  In almost all other cases though and in particular the average case and worst case, the ToList()/FindIndex() combo wins for performance, even though it is creating some temporary memory to hold the List<T>.  If you examine the algorithm, the reason why is most likely because once it’s in a ToList() form, internally FindIndex() scans the internal array which is much more efficient to iterate over.  Thus, it takes a one time performance hit (not including any GC impact) to create the List<T> but after that the performance is much better. Summary If you’re concerned about too many throw-away objects, you can always roll your own FindIndex() method, but for sheer simplicity and overall performance, using the ToList()/FindIndex() combo performs best on nearly all list sizes in the average and worst cases.    Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Litte Wonders,BlackRabbitCoder,Software,LINQ,List

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  • Developing wheel reinventing tendencies into a skill as opposed to reluctantly learning wheel-finding skills? [duplicate]

    - by Korey Hinton
    This question already has an answer here: Is reinventing the wheel really all that bad? 20 answers I am more of a high-level wheel reinventor. I definitely prefer to make use of existing API features built into a language and popular third-party frameworks that I know can solve the problem, however when I have a particular problem that I feel capable of solving within a reasonable time I am very reluctant to find someone else's solution. Here are a few reasons why I reinvent: It takes time to learn a new API API restrictions might exist that I don't know about Avoiding re-work of unfamiliar code I am conflicted between doing what I know and shifting to a new technique I don't feel comfortable with. On one hand I feel like following my instincts and getting really good at solving problems, especially ones that I would never challenge myself with if all I did was try to find answers. And on the other hand I feel like I might be missing out on important skills like saving time by finding the right framework and expanding my knowledge by learning how to use a new framework. I guess my question comes down to this: My current attitude is to stick to the built-in API and APIs I know well* and to not spend my time searching github for a solution to a problem I know I can solve myself within a reasonable amount of time. Is that a reasonable balance for a successful programmer? *Obviously I will still look around for new frameworks that save time and solve/simplify difficult problems.

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  • Bracketing algorithm when root finding. Single root in "quadratic" function

    - by Ander Biguri
    I am trying to implement a root finding algorithm. I am using the hybrid Newton-Raphson algorithm found in numerical recipes that works pretty nicely. But I have a problem in bracketing the root. While implementing the root finding algorithm I realised that in several cases my functions have 1 real root and all the other imaginary (several of them, usually 6 or 9). The only root I am interested is in the real one so the problem is not there. The thing is that the function approaches the root like a cubic function, touching with the point the y=0 axis... Newton-Rapson method needs some brackets of different sign and all the bracketing methods I found don't work for this specific case. What can I do? It is pretty important to find that root in my program... EDIT: more problems: sometimes due to reaaaaaally small numerical errors, say a variation of 1e-6 in some value the "cubic" function does NOT have that real root, it is just imaginary with a neglectable imaginary part... (checked with matlab) EDIT 2: Much more information about the problem. Ok, I need root finding algorithm. Info I have: The root I need to find is between [0-1] , if there are more roots outside that part I am not interested in them. The root is real, there may be imaginary roots, but I don't want them. Probably all the rest of the roots will be imaginary The root may be double in that point, but I think that actually doesn't mater in numerical analysis problems I need to use the root finding algorithm several times during the overall calculations, but the function will always be a polynomial In one of the particular cases of the root finding, my polynomial will be similar to a quadratic function that touches Y=0 with the point. Example of a real case: The coefficient may not be 100% precise and that really slight imprecision may make the function not to touch the Y=0 axis. I cannot solve for this specific case because in other cases it may be that the polynomial is pretty normal and doesn't make any "strange" thing. The method I am actually using is NewtonRaphson hybrid, where if the derivative is really small it makes a bisection instead of NewRaph (found in numerical recipes). Matlab's answer to the function on the image: roots: 0.853553390593276 + 0.353553390593278i 0.853553390593276 - 0.353553390593278i 0.146446609406726 + 0.353553390593273i 0.146446609406726 - 0.353553390593273i 0.499999999999996 + 0.000000040142134i 0.499999999999996 - 0.000000040142134i The function is a real example I prepared where I know that the answer I want is 0.5 Note: I still haven't check completely some of the answers I you people have give me (Thank you!), I am just trying to give al the information I already have to complete the question.

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  • How could I fix WICD? it's not longer finding networks

    - by poz2k4444
    I'm on backtrack5 R2, and I was working fine, the problem is recently the WICD is no longer finding networks, but I can still connect to the networks I had, I've tried with dpkg-reconfigure wicd and after restart not noticeable change is done, how can I connect new networks or reconfigure again the manager?? When I search networks with airomon-ng mon0 I can find some but with the WICD not, thanks!!

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  • Why would a process monitoring script use exit 1; on finding no problems?

    - by user568458
    General question: On a Linux (Centos) server, if a process monitoring script run by cron is set to close with exit 1; rather than exit 0; on finding that everything is okay and that no action is needed, is that a mistake? Or are there legitimate reasons for calling exit 1; instead of exit 0; on the "Everything's fine, no action needed" condition? exit 0; on finding no problems seems to me to be more appropriate. But maybe there's something I'm not aware of. For example, maybe there's something specific to Cron? Or maybe there's a convention in process monitoring scripts that 'failure' means 'this script failed to need to fix a problem' (rather than what I would expect which is that exit 1; would mean 'the process being monitored has failed'?) My specific case: I'm looking at a process monitoring script written by my web hosting company. By process monitoring script, I mean a script executed by Cron on a regular basis that checks if an important system process is running, and if it isn't running, takes actions such as mailing an administrator or restarting the process. Here's the (generalised) structure of their script, for a service running on port 8080 (in this case, Apache Tomcat): SERVICE=$(/usr/sbin/lsof -i tcp:8080 | wc -l); if [ $SERVICE != 0 ]; then exit 1; else #take action fi Seems simple enough even for someone with limited knowledge like me, except the exit 1; part seems odd. As I understand it, exit 0; closes a program and signifies to the parent that executed the program that everything is fine, exit n; where n0 and n<127 signifies that there has been some kind of error or problem. Here, their script seems to go against that rule - it calls exit 1; in the condition where everything is fine, and doesn't exit after taking remedial action in the problem condition. To me, this looks like a mistake - but my experience in this area is limited. Are there cases where calling exit 1; in the "Everything's fine, no action needed" condition is more appropriate than calling exit 0;? Or is it a mistake? Wider context is pretty simple. It's a Centos VPS, running Plesk. The script is being called by Cron via Plesk's "Scheduled tasks" Cron manager. There's no custom layer between Cron and this script that would respond in an unusual way to the exit call. It's a fairly average, almost out-of-the box Plesk-managed Centos VPS (in so far as there is such a thing). The process being monitored by this script is Apache Tomcat.

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  • TFS Build Server not finding 'Microsoft.Expression.Interactions&rsquo;

    - by Chris Skardon
    We’ve been trying to get the build server to pick up the Microsoft.Expression.Interactions.dll needed so we can use things like the ExtendedVisualStateManager and the DataStateBehavior. Adding the DataStateBehavior in Blend adds the reference to the project, so it all compiles fine on the local machine. Checking in the code into a CI server throws up some ugliness: d:\Builds\6\Source\MyFile.xaml (290): The tag 'DataStateBehavior' does not exist in XML namespace 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/2010/interactions'. Errr, it should do…?? The reference is there, so… ahhhhh! A quick check of the properties and we’re using the dll from the c:\program files (x86)\ location, no wonder the build server can’t find it – let’s add the dll into our (ever expanding) ‘lib’ folder, reference that version, and check that bad boy in… No. Still No. Still get the same error. What the??? The reference is still pointing to the program files location?? Ok, so let’s modify the csproj file using the wonderful notepad, changing the reference from <Reference Include="Microsoft.Expression.Interactions, /* loadsa shizzle here */ /> to <Reference Include="Microsoft.Expression.Interactions">     <HintPath>..\Lib\Microsoft.Expression.Interactions.dll</HintPath> </Reference> Check that in, aaaand… Success!!! The reason for this (from what I can gather from here) is that we’re using the Productivity Power Tools, and they try to be clever about referencing dlls, and changed what we’d asked (i.e. for the local version) to use the original program files location.. Editing the file in notepad (sweet sweet notepad) gets around this issue… Irritating, took a while to figure this out… Meh :)

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  • Programmaticaly finding the Landau notation (Big O or Theta notation) of an algorithm?

    - by Julien L
    I'm used to search for the Landau (Big O, Theta...) notation of my algorithms by hand to make sure they are as optimized as they can be, but when the functions are getting really big and complex, it's taking way too much time to do it by hand. it's also prone to human errors. I spent some time on Codility (coding/algo exercises), and noticed they will give you the Landau notation for your submitted solution (both in Time and Memory usage). I was wondering how they do that... How would you do it? Is there another way besides Lexical Analysis or parsing of the code? PS: This question concerns mainly PHP and or JavaScript, but I'm opened to any language and theory.

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  • Finding the time to program in your spare time?

    - by Omar Kooheji
    I've got about a dozen programming projects bouncing about my head, and I'd love to contribute to some open source projects, the problem I have is that having spent the entire day staring at Visual Studio and or Eclipse (Sometimes both at the same time...) the last thing I feel like doing when I go home is program. How do you build up the motivation/time to work on your own projects after work? I'm not saying that I don't enjoy programming, it's just that I enjoy other things to and it can be hard to even do something you enjoy if you've spent all day already doing it. I think that if I worked at a chocolate factory the last thing I'd want to see when I got home was a Wonka bar.

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  • What are the possible options for AI path-finding etc when the world is "partitionned"?

    - by Sebastien Diot
    If you anticipate a large persistent game world, and you don't want to end up with some game server crashing due to overload, then you have to design from the ground up a game world that is partitioned in chunks. This is in particular true if you want to run your game servers in the cloud, where each individual VM is relatively week, and memory and CPU are at a premium. I think the biggest challenge here is that the player receives all the parts around the location of the avatar, but mobs/monsters are normally located in the server itself, and can only directly access the data about the part of the world that the server own. So how can we make the AI behave realistically in that context? It can send queries to the other servers that own the neighboring parts, but that sounds rather network intensive and latency prone. It would probably be more performant for each mob AI to be spread over the neighboring parts, and proactively send the relevant info to the part that contains the actual mob atm. That would also reduce the stress in a mob crossing a border between two parts, and therefore "switching server". Have you heard of any AI design that solves those issues? Some kind of distributed AI brain? Maybe some kind of "agent" community working together through message passing?

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  • Finding it Hard to Deliver Right Customer Experience: Think BPM!

    - by Ajay Khanna
    Our relationship with our customers is not a just a single interaction and we should not treat it like one. A customer’s relationship with a vendor is like a journey which starts way before customer makes a purchase and lasts long after that. The journey may start with customer researching a product that may lead to the eventual purchase and may continue with support or service needs for the product. A typical customer journey can be represented as shown below: As you may notice, customers tend to use multiple channels to interact with a company throughout their journey.  They also expect that they should get consistent experience, no matter what interaction channel they may choose. Customers do not like to repeat the information they have already provided and expect companies to remember their preferences, and offer them relevant products and services. If the company fails to meet this expectation, customers not only will abandon the purchase and go to the competitor but may also influence others’ purchase decision. Gone are the days when word of mouth was the only medium, and the customer could influence “Six” others. This is the age of social media and customer’s good or bad experience, especially bad get highly amplified and may influence hundreds of others. Challenges that face B2C companies today include: Delivering consistent experience: The reason that delivering consistent experience is challenging is due to fragmented data, disjointed systems and siloed multichannel interactions. Customers tend to get different service quality if they use web vs. phone vs. store. They get different responses from different service agents or get inconsistent answers if they call sales vs. service group in the company. Such inconsistent experiences result in lower customer satisfaction or NPS (net promoter score) numbers. Increasing Revenue: To stay competitive companies frequently introduce new products and services. Delay in launching such offerings has a significant impact on revenue realization. In addition to new product revenue, there are multiple opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell that impact bottom line. If companies are not able to identify such opportunities, bring a product to market quickly, or not offer the right product to the right customer at the right time, significant loss of revenue may occur. Ensuring Compliance: Companies must be compliant to ever changing regulations, these could be about Know Your Customer (KYC), Export/Import regulations, or taxation policies. In addition to government agencies, companies also need to comply with the SLA that they have committed to their customers. Lapse in meeting any of these requirements may lead to serious fines, penalties and loss in business. Companies have to make sure that they are in compliance will all such regulations and SLA commitments, at any given time. With the advent of social networks and mobile technology, companies not only need to focus on process efficiency but also on customer engagement. Improving engagement means delivering the customer experience as the customer is expecting and interacting with the customer at right time using right channel. Customers expect to be able to contact you via any channel of their choice (web, email, chat, mobile, social media), purchase via any viable channel (web, phone, store, mobile). Customers expect companies to understand their particular needs and remember their preferences on repeated visits. To deliver such an integrated, consistent, and contextual experience, power of BPM in must. Your company may be organized in departments like Marketing, Sales, Service. You may hold prospect data in SFA, order information in ERP, customer issues in CRM. However, the experience delivered to the customer must not be constrained by your system legacy. BPM helps in designing the right experience for the right customer and integrates all the underlining channels, systems, applications to make sure right information will be delivered to the right knowledge worker or to the customer every single time.     Orchestrating information across all systems (MDM, CRM, ERP), departments (commerce, merchandising, marketing service) and channels (Email, phone, web, social)  is the key, and that’s what BPM delivers. In addition to orchestrating systems and channels for consistency, BPM also provides an ability for analysis and decision management. By using data from historical transactions, social media and from other systems, users can determine the customer preferences, customer value, and churn propensity. This information, in the context, is then used while making a decision at a process step. Working with real-time decision management system can also suggest right up-sell or cross-sell offers, discounts or next-best-action steps for a particular customer. Timely action on customer issues or request is also a key tenet of a good customer experience. BPM’s complex event processing capabilities help companies to take proactive actions before issues get escalated. BPM system can be designed to listen to a certain event patters then deduce from those customer situations (credit card stolen, baggage lost, change of address) and do a triage before situation goes out of control. If such a situation arises you can send alerts to right people or immediately invoke corrective actions. Last but not least one of BPM’s key values is to drive continuous improvement. Learning about customers past experiences, interactions and social conversations, provide valuable insight. Such insight can be used to improve products, customer facing processes, and customer experience. You may take these insights as an input to design better more efficient and customer friendly sales, contact center or self-service processes. If customer experience is important for your business, make sure you have incorporated BPM as a part of your strategy to design, orchestrate and improve your customer facing processes.

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