I’ve recently come across a very interesting article on BitHacks – the low level magics for bit level operations. Some of the tricks introduced here are really excellently clever, some of them may even make you exclaim for their genius!

I had a lot of fun reading through some of the BitHacks. It’s also worth noticing these BitHacks are not only for intellectual pleasures, they provide actual boosts to algorithm performance as well. When an operations is used often enough, the overall performance benefits to the whole program might be significant.

I couldn’t help but keep wondering how on earth did these clever CS guys ever come up with such algorithms. I tried very hard to find some answers and the following are some patterns I noticed in this attempt. Still, honestly, I highly doubt if I can come up with same solutions myself if I ever run into these problems again. Some of them are just to clever.

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Finally! Just finished all the lecture videos of “Algorithm I” from Coursera, and I believe now it’s a good time to review and summarize.

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This is a holiday reading summary. I recently came across two interesting blogs on fundamental concepts in computer science, both with the title “10 Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice)”. One could be found in here, and another one in Fogus’ blog. Topics of these papers range from Programming Language theories, functional programming, to Lamport’s distributed system theories. I will read and summarize some of them in my blog. It’ll be 20 papers, and 40 paper-readings to do if I do read each one twice. So, it might be a long time before all is finished.

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