Fifty Solitaires – The Upgrade
Posted 5th October 2023 by Holger Schmitz
It has been well over a year since I last posted about this project. I have been busy with other projects and had to leave this one on the back burner. A lot has changed since then and the first thing that I noticed when looking at this project again was that I now needed […]
Computational Physics Basics: Polynomial Interpolation
Posted 19th April 2023 by Holger Schmitz
The piecewise constant interpolation and the linear interpolation seen in the previous post can be understood as special cases of a more general interpolation method. Piecewise constant interpolation constructs a polynomial of order 0 that passes through a single point. Linear interpolation constructs a polynomial of order 1 that passes through 2 points. We can […]
Starting GPU programming with Kokkos
Posted 9th March 2023 by Holger Schmitz
The high performance computing landscape has changed quite a bit over the last years. For quite a few decades, the major architecture for HPC systems was based on classical CPU processors distributed over many nodes. The nodes are connected via a fast network architecture. These compute clusters have evolved over time. A typical simulation code […]
Fifty Solitaires – Piling it Up
Posted 16th March 2022 by Holger Schmitz
So here is the third instalment of my Solitaire card game. In the previous post, I created the basic Card component and set up Storybook to let me browse and test my components while developing them. Today, I will create another component that displays a collection of cards. In a Solitaire game, cards are arranged […]
Computational Physics Basics: Piecewise and Linear Interpolation
Posted 24th February 2022 by Holger Schmitz
One of the main challenges of computational physics is the problem of representing continuous functions in time and space using the finite resources supplied by the computer. A mathematical function of one or more continuous variables naturally has an infinite number of degrees of freedom. These need to be reduced in some manner to be […]
The Harmonic Oscillator
Posted 11th February 2022 by Holger Schmitz
I wasn’t really planning on writing this post. I was preparing a different post when I found that I needed to explain a property of the so-called “harmonic oscillator”. I first thought about adding a little excursion into the article that I was going to write. But I found that the harmonic oscillator is such […]
Fifty Solitaires – It’s in the Cards
Posted 8th December 2021 by Holger Schmitz
This is the second instalment of my series in which I am developing a JavaScript solitaire game that allows the player to choose between many different rules of Solitaire. As I explained in my previous post, the motivation for this project came from an old bet that I made with a friend of mine. The […]
Frege’s Numbers
Posted 19th November 2021 by Holger Schmitz
In a previous post, I started talking about natural numbers and how the Peano axioms define the relation between natural numbers. These axioms allow you to work with numbers and are good enough for most everyday uses. From a philosophical point of view, the Peano axioms have one big drawback. They only tell us how […]
Computational Physics: Truncation and Rounding Errors
Posted 15th October 2021 by Holger Schmitz
In a previous post, I talked about accuracy and precision in numerical calculations. Ideally one would like to perform calculations that are perfect in these two aspects. However, this is almost never possible in practical situations. The reduction of accuracy or precision is due to two numerical errors. These errors can be classified into two […]
Fifty Solitaires – A Beginning
Posted 22nd September 2021 by Holger Schmitz
Many years ago, when I was a physics student and I was just getting to know the ins and outs of programming, I made a bet with a friend of mine. At the time my mother was into solitaire card games, the ones with real cards you play on the kitchen table. This was before […]