Category: Electronics

Homemade Custom Fortnite Controller

Custom Fortnite Controller

I will be upfront about this. I am not a gamer: PC, console, mobile or otherwise. But, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, like every pre-teen and as it turns out, many adults,  I was bitten by the Fortnite bug earlier this year. With not an X-Box nor Playstation to my name and no …

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Necessity and Sufficiency

Necessity - Sufficient Venn Diagram

Am I sufficient? Am I even necessary? If you’re plagued by these existential questions and have ended up here in your quest for an answer, then I’ve got some bad news for you. The answer to both is no. I keed. I keed. Actually, the bad news is that this post is about necessity and …

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NFA and DFA Equivalence Theorem Proof and Example

Finite state automata (FSA), also known as finite state machines (FSM), are usually classified as being deterministic (DFA) or non-deterministic (NFA). A deterministic finite state automaton has exactly one transition from every state for each possible input. In other words, whatever state the FSA is in, if it encounters a symbol for which a transition …

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Proof of Kleene’s Theorem

Base Regular Language Transition Graphs

In my last post, “Kleene’s Theorem,” I provided some useful background information about strings, regular languages, regular expressions, and finite automata before introducing the eponymously named theorem that has become one of the cornerstones of artificial intelligence and more specifically, natural language processing (NLP).  Kleene’s Theorem tells us that regular expressions and finite state automata …

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Kleene’s Theorem

Stephen Kleene

Stephen Cole Kleene was an American mathematician who’s groundbreaking work in the sub-field of logic known as recursion theory laid the groundwork for modern computing.  While most computer programmers might not know his name or the significance of his work regarding computable functions, I am willing to bet that anyone who has ever dealt with …

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Not String Theory – String Facts

Strings

As a computer programmer for more than a quarter of century, I don’t think I have ever thought much about strings. I knew the basics. In every language I’d worked with, strings were a data type unto themselves. Superficially they are a sequence of characters, but behind the scenes, computers store and manipulate them as …

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Number System Complements

In my last post about binary signed integers, I introduced the ones complement representation. At the time, I said that the ones complement was found by taking the bitwise complement of the number. My explanation about how to do this was simple: invert each bit, flipping 1 to 0 and vice versa. While it’s true that …

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Osram Unveils New LIDAR System for Autonomous Vehicles

Osram Scanning LIDAR

LIDAR (LIght Detecting And Ranging) sensors play a critical role in almost all autonomous and semiautonomous vehicles. Using lasers and relatively simple time of flight calculations, LIDAR can very accurately measure distances and generate detailed 3D maps of environments, but traditionally the best performing systems have been large and very expensive. German lighting manufacturer Osram Opto Semiconductors unveiled their new …

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Binary Signed Integers – Ones Complement

In the last post, we saw that one of the major failings of the signed magnitude representation was that addition and subtraction could not be performed on the same hardware as for unsigned integers. As I pointed out, the reason for this is because negating a number in signed magnitude does not yield the additive …

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Researchers Create Low-Power Nanowire Artificial Synapses

ONW synaptic transistor

South Korean scientists from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology appear to have cleared the largest obstacle to the feasibility of building brain-like computers: power consumption. In their paper “Organic core-sheath nanowire artificial synapses with femtojoule energy consumption,” published in the June 17th edition of Science Advances, …

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