NAND Game, Sun 20th Dec 2020

Loving this wee game that challanges you to build up logic circuits from the basics, certainly sends me back to school days attempting to build various computer components.

Found via O'Reilly Radar's Four short links posts.

Language Models for Distributed Information Retrieval

Throw Back Thursday to my MSc Thesis of 2000, Thu 17th Dec 2020

20 years ago I completed my MSc in Computing: Information Engineering. To mark the anniversary I've had a dig about in the archives - overcoming obstacles such as no longer having a device that can read CD's anymore - and dusted off my MSc Thesis: Landuage Models for Distributed Information Retrieval.

Abstract: "Distributed systems provide an efficient means for accessing large, dynamic information sources such as the Internet. There modular nature comes from the ability to group related documents together and focus processing on the groups that are most relevant to a user's information need.

This report compares the use of two language modelling techniques for clustering documents. The first technique is based upon comparing document statistics to find similarities between documents and clusters, the second uses compression. It is shown that the second technique performs badly due to the poor identification of the key features that discriminate between clusters. However, several improvements are suggested that could make it more competitive."