James Tauber's Blog 2007/11/10

blog > 2007 > 11 >

I Wish NBC Shows Were On iTunes Again

I wish NBC would sell their shows on iTunes again. Watching Heroes on nbc.com is horrible.

by : Created on Nov. 11, 2007 : Last modified Nov. 11, 2007 : (permalink)

Distance and Checksum Algorithms on Lists

Related to the programming competition, I've started thinking about algorithms for:

• measuring the distance between two orderings of the same list (I guess number of swaps required to go from one to the other; even better if the algorithm gave you the swaps required)
• order-sensitive checksums on lists of integers (as above, the lists always contain the same elements but the goal is to have a checksum that distinguishes different orderings with minimal clashes)

Any suggestions for approaches to these? Working Python code would be even better :-)

by : Created on Nov. 10, 2007 : Last modified Nov. 10, 2007 : (permalink)