Recently I attended a demonstration of a product intended to help design software, right down to implementation details. It failed to convince me. It did, however, succeed in reminding me of this short work by Jorge Luis Borges: On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. …In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire,…

A quick note on some useful updates made to standard Python maths support. Math.prod does for * what sum does for +. It was added at Python 3.8. >>> math.prod([3, 4, 5]) 60 >>> math.prod([]) 1 Added in 3.9, math.lcm, returns the least common multiple of its integer arguments. As with math.prod, an empty list of arguments returns 1. Extended in 3.9, the related function math.gcd now accepts an arbitrary list of arguments. For Euclidean geometry, math.hypot now supports n-dimensional points, and math.dist has been added, again working on any pair of n-dimensional points. These useful additions and extensions are all in the standard math module (along with several others…

Jurassic Jigsaw My thanks to Eric Wastl for another excellent Advent of Code. I’ve now worked through all 25 puzzles, some simple, some tough, some familiar, some new; all beautifully set and highly enjoyable. Day 20, Jurrasic Jigsaw, took me longest by far to complete. The puzzle is easy to understand. You have to assemble jigsaw pieces into a seascape. For part one, you need to find the corner pieces. For part two, you must locate monsters in the seascape. Here, a jigsaw piece is a monochrome square, represented like so: ..##.#..#. ##..#..... #...##..#. ####.#...# ##.##.###. ##...#.### .#.#.#..## ..#....#.. ###...#.#. ..###..### And this is the sea monster: # # ##…