ghratch

I hope this doesn't come across as snarky, but this is very apropos for me.

I'm currently taking 6.856 at MIT, Randomized Algorithms, and one of the core lessons from the class is that random guessing is frequently a superior strategy. You can have Las Vegas algorithms which find a correct solution and probably execute quickly, or Monte Carlo algorithms which execute quickly and probably find a correct solution. The users are employing a Las Vegas strategy here.

So, perhaps he just didn't take the right classes at MIT :-).

For a neat example, check out finding a min-cut of a graph in a randomized fashion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karger%27s_algorithm

I thought spanning trees were elected/discovered automatically by the routers themselves instead of being manually set up.

On Linux you could try using the Fast Reversible Debugger (https://github.com/fred-dbg/fred) for its memory-accurate record/replay feature. Full disclosure: I was a contributor on that project at one point.

As I stated in a previous comment, it's called "incremental search" and you can do it in vim. Look here for how: http://linuxcommando.blogspot.com/2008/06/smart-case-insensi...

How is this better or different than incremental search? Incremental search means it jumps to the first match as soon as you start typing after '/': you don't need to press enter.

Try this combination of options to get functionality similar to emacs's C-s:

:set ignorecase :set smartcase :set incsearch

I find this extremely interesting. I'm a programmer who has had some mental block when it comes to "real math" (whatever that means). I'm very eager to change how I think about math to try to break through the mental barrier. Do you have any books or blogs or anything to recommend that reflect your change in thinking?

The summations as for loops is what got my attention, as I am guilty of that. Also the idea of math as more manipulable than programming is intriguing.

There is an open-source (but Linux only) project called FReD which does reversible debugging for C and C++ programs: https://github.com/fred-dbg/fred

It works without modifying the program (e.g. no recompilation step necessary) or the debugger (like gdb).