Someone in this thread https://slacker-news.fly.dev/item?id=40401343 linked to a udemy course, then I noticed udemy currently is offerring more than 80% discount on some courses. The discount offer expires in 4 days. I still have some cash with me from the crappy upwork jobs I did a while back, and I want to purchases one or two courses.
Why courses though, I can just read a book. True, for programming, math or anything text-based, articles/books are better for the most part. But for visual, realtime interactive stuffs, watching a video is way better. Things like gamedev, blender, photoshop, and video editing.
What about youtube videos though? Yeah, youtube has tons of content, but it also has a lot of half-baked, low-effort or shallow videos that have terrible pedagogical quality.
Still, I'm not sure udemy would be any better, but it's worth a shot. At the very least, the content is professionally made. Also, udemy offers certificate of completion, so I could use that too when job searching.
That all said, I'm going to try godot courses, since I had no luck finding a comprehensive, good resource for doing godot developement. And maybe some dart+flutter courses.
So I started creating triangles in increasing size. For instance, I have three triangles T1, T2, and T3. T1 has 10 dots in it, T2 has 15, and T3 21.
10 15 21
.
. ..
. .. ...
.. ... ....
... .... .....
.... ..... ......
T1 T2 T3The more interesting part is that I could create squares by combining two consecutive triangles. For instance, combining T1 and T2 creates a square, and combining T2 and T3 also creates a square. By induction, this should hold for triangles of any size.
I wonder what other shapes I can create from rectangles.
Not sure how I could use this for factoring, but it's an interesting self-discovery. The question now is, given a square number, say, 196 = 14*14, how do I get the pair of two consecutive triangle numbers that add up to it. Well, aside from recursion.
Aha, wikipedia cheat to the rescue:
T1 + T2 = [(14**2)/2 + 14/2] + [(14**2)/2 - 14/2]
= 105 + 91
= 196Okay, I've done enough progress on the ant project to the point it's useable now for playing around with squares, specifically for improving the algorithm. Funny, I still haven't implemented the langton's ant, but it should be trivial to add later on since I'm more or less done with preparatory stuffs.
And so, after some playing around, I managed to find a slight tweak in the algorithm to reduces the number of steps by more than half. But, I don't know yet if that change is correct, since I think it's possible to "overstep" and skip over the proper solution.
