By now, we’ve all heard of the addictive tile-mashing game called 2048. Last week, I picked up 2048 for the first time and — true to my nature — I started designing an AI to beat the game for me…
Artificial Intelligence has crushed all human records in 2048. Here’s how the AI pulled it off.
Posted in analysis, data visualization Tagged with: 2048, artificial intelligence, strategy, video games
Optimized walking tours of New York City and Philadelphia
In the past couple weeks, I’ve shown you how to use machine learning to improve the efficiency of road trips all over the world, including the U.S., Europe, and South America. In this post, I’d like to show you how…
Posted in analysis, data visualization, machine learning Tagged with: genetic algorithm, machine learning, optimization, traveling salesman problem, walking tour
Pure Michigan road trip, optimized
For the past couple weeks, I’ve been computing optimal road trips across the U.S. and Europe. This time, as a shout-out to my current home state, I made a road trip around Michigan. With the snow melting and a warm…
Posted in analysis, data visualization, machine learning Tagged with: genetic algorithm, machine learning, optimization, road trip, traveling salesman problem
Computing the optimal road trip across South America
By popular request, I’ve created another follow-up to my posts about computing optimal road trips across the U.S. and Europe. This time, I made an optimal road trip around South America. If you’d like to get into the nitty-gritty of…
Posted in analysis, data visualization, machine learning Tagged with: genetic algorithm, machine learning, optimization, road trip, South America, traveling salesman problem
Computing the optimal road trip across Europe
As a follow-up to my post about computing optimal road trips across the U.S., I thought it’d be fun to make a road trip map for Europe as well. If you’d like to get into the nitty-gritty of how these…
Posted in analysis, data visualization, machine learning Tagged with: Europe, genetic algorithm, machine learning, optimization, road trip, traveling salesman problem
Computing the optimal road trip across the U.S.
Last week, Tracy Staedter from Discovery News proposed an interesting idea to me: Why not use the same algorithm from my Where’s Waldo article to compute the optimal road trip across every state in the U.S.? Visiting every U.S. state…
Posted in analysis, data visualization, machine learning Tagged with: genetic algorithm, machine learning, optimization, road trip, traveling salesman problem
Top 25 richest living comedians
It’s fairly common knowledge that comedy isn’t a terribly lucrative career. Not only do most comedians spend decades doing small-time standup hoping to be discovered, but most of those comedians never end up being discovered either. But what about the…
Revisiting the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
In early 1994, three Albright College students were watching Footloose during a heavy snowstorm. By pure coincidence, the next movie that came on the television was The Air Up There, another popular film starring Kevin Bacon. Intrigued by the coincidence,…
Posted in analysis, data visualization Tagged with: Bacon number, Eric Roberts, film, Kevin Bacon, six degrees of separation
Design critique: Putting Big Pharma spending in perspective
Recently, /r/DataIsBeautiful began hosting weekly visualization redesign competitions challenging everyone to come up with better and less misleading designs of existing graphics. Below is the first of many redesigns and detailed critiques that I will be working on. In early…
Posted in data visualization Tagged with: big pharma, budget, design critique, marketing, r&d, remake
Here’s Waldo: Computing the optimal search strategy for finding Waldo
As I found myself unexpectedly snowed in this weekend, I decided to take on a weekend project for fun. While searching for something to catch my fancy, I ran across an old Slate article claiming that they found a foolproof…
Posted in analysis, data visualization, machine learning Tagged with: genetic algorithm, machine learning, optimization, traveling salesman problem, where's waldo
