A few days ago I wrote about using Claude to solve a chess puzzle by writing Prolog code. This morning I tried a similar chess puzzle with ChatGPT. The task is to place a queen, king, rook, bishop, and knight on a 4 by 4 chessboard so no piece attacks another. Of course there’s not […]

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Back when the US government classified strong encryption as “munitions,” RSA public key cryptography was illegal to export. In 1995, Adam Back protested this by creating a terse, obfuscated implementation of RSA in Perl code and used it as an email signature. The code was also printed on T-shirts. The shirt was classified as munitions […]

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Prolog is the original logic programming language. The name comes from programming in logic. More specifically, the name comes from programmation en logique because the inventor of the language, Philippe Roussel, is French. Prolog has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages is that the language represents logical problems directly. One of the disadvantages […]

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I ran an experiment today to see whether Claude [1] could generate Lean code to prove a calculation at the bottom of this post, six lines of calculus. I started with this prompt This page contains a mathematical proof that a Fourier coefficient, a_n, is given in terms of a Bessel function. The LaTeX source […]

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Often there’s a thread running through a sequence of my posts. Sometimes I make this explicit and sometimes I don’t. The latest thread started with this post commenting on a tweet that observed that exp(−x²) ≈ (1 + cos(sin(x) + x))/2. Some people said online that that the approximation is simply due to the first […]

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