Comments of chapter undefined of XP
XP
OneFist
Chapter comments13
Over the weekend I did my first hackathon with a couple friends. It was 24 hours long (as are most) and you have to code a project. It can be anything as long as it's within 24 hours. The hack in hackathon isn't hacking into something, it's hacking a solution together. I pulled an all nighter, staying awake for 34 hours total and our project was converting Verilog HDL (Hardware Description Language) into Minecraft redstone. Verilog is used in "the industry" and can be used for things such as designing computer chips. Our program can take a Verilog file and implement it in redstone. The program was completed in 24 hours, it works. The main problem is with routing the logic gates together. how do you route the gates so that the wires don't cross and don't interfere, and while paying attention to redstone signal strength? This is similar to what chip manufacturers face. Theoretically, you could put the design of an intel chip into our program and it would work. The issue is that it would take ages to find a solution. We only had 24 hours for this very ambitious project so efficiency was not our goal. Our program can route a 3-bit counter in reasonable time but more complex examples take longer. I accidentally left my computer on overnight after the hackathon and it was running the program on a 4-bit adder. 21 hours later, it couldn't find a solution (or was stuck in a loop). Theoretically our program has a worst case complexity of O(Forever) because we use a random shuffle to place the gates because some gates are impossible. We shuffle the gates, if it's impossible we shuffle it again and try again
Also, someone else has tried this. 3 final year undergraduate students in a university in Canada attempted to solve this same problem as their final year thesis project. They only got combinatorial logic working (i.e. and, not, nand) however we got sequential logic working as well (i.e. d-type flip flop). So we beat their thesis project in only 24 hours. The sequential logic allows us to do stuff like the counter because the counter requires knowledge of state, it requires you to know what the current number is but this is impossible in sequential logic.Granted, if you compare both of our solutions on a sequential logic problem, theirs would probably be faster and more compact. But again, ours is more general.
[img=exp][img=exp]There are traditionally 4 stages of sleep: awake, light, deep, and REM sleep. Each one plays an essential role in maintaining your mental and physical health. As you're reading about sleep, you may also see the terms “NREM” or “NREM Stages 1-4.” These are simply other terms for the phases of sleep.
