Making Your SQL Easier To Type and Read: Ordinals and Aliases

Writing SQL can be a painful experience. But there are two shortcuts that can be used to make your code easier to type. Both shortcuts are cool to understand, but only one is actually advised by the broader “SQL community”.

Two New Lifecycles of Fads: Viewing Programming Fads as 'Product Fads'

In the past, I wrote about Yali Pali’s paper about the lifecycle of intellectual fads. I am curious about fads because the programming field seems prone to them, and it’s important to avoid fads at all costs. Today, I learned two new ways to explain fads, after reading When a Fad Ends: An Agent-Based Model of Imitative Behavior by Margo Bergman.

Minimaxing the Minimax Algorithm in Tic-Tac-Toe: In Praise of Hardcoding

For a recent coding challenge, I had to implement an AI for a Tic-Tac-Toe game. This AI should not be able to lose a match. A quick Google search reveals that the most efficent way is to use a minimax algorithm to determine what moves are likely to cause the AI to either tie or win against another player. However, nobody I found seemed to analyze what decisions the AI actually makes.

Robojournalists vs. Humans: The German Study

Automated Insights and Narrative Science are two companies that specialize in producing software that can write news articles. But how do these news articles stack up to the human-written competition? A German researcher attempts to find out.

Narrative Science's AI Beliefs: Revealing Hopes (and Fears)

“Practical Artificial Intelligence for Dummies: Narrative Science Edition” is a free e-book that provides a quick introduction into the AI field. It is also a treatise that outlined Narrative Science’s approach towards dealing with AI.