Filler

Aug 15 2007

Nerdmaster does something useful…

Published by Nerdmaster at 1:26 am under Programming

No, children, this isn’t the unbelievable (and fictitious) story of a bad little nerd who finally finds redemption via some amazingly-selfless act. This is, instead, the true story of me, the very selfish nerd who offers something useful to the world in order to make himself (myself) feel superior.

I’ve been into statistics lately, and built a really slick hypergeometric distribution probability calculator. I offer the C++ and Ruby source for free, so if you’re interested in statistics and programming, check it out.

Why do I do this? Simple - for starters, I can always use the publicity. I linked to my page from wikipedia’s article. I never would have bothered to put my code up until I noticed that the only other link (here comes the superiority complex) was to a calculator that’s dog slow and gets odd values in some cases - if your desirables (white marbles) are set to 10 and your sample size (marbles drawn) are set to 20, it will actually show drawing 11 desirables as being possible! Plus it doesn’t show data in a very friendly way, doesn’t really explain the algorithm, and doesn’t offer source code. So I figured I could get some math nerds onto my site by throwing that link there, and more visitors is always good, even if they’re icky math nerds.

The other reason is to impress some C++ loving weirdos at Arena Net. I guess they think a client/server game with strict performance requirements should be written in C++ or something stupid like that. I tried to explain that VB is the only language for programming a serious game, but they just wouldn’t listen.

Anyway, enjoy the code. I licensed it as a “use however the frack you want” kind of license, so if it’s useful to you, just let me know you like it.