Daniel Nichols

Daniel Nichols

dnicho [△] umd [◯] [▣] [△=@ ◯=. ▣=edu]

Blog posts

2023

Stocking the Bar

9 minute read

Published:

Experimenting with cocktails and the myriads of flavors and presentations can be a delightful culinary avocation. However, stocking a bar is expensive. Different mixing alcohols typically range from 10-50 USD and you also need a swarm of other syrups, garnishes, and toppers. Even with a reasonable selection of bottles one can still find themselves with a lackluster number of cocktails that they can make. After going through this morose experience myself I began to wonder what an ideal set of cocktail ingredients would be. As it turns out this problem can be solved (sort of) with some old fashioned computer science.

2022

ML Madness

6 minute read

Published:

March Madness brings about spirited competition amongst friends and family to see who can pick the better basketball tournament bracket. Some pick theirs randomly, some pick by favorite mascot, while others try to use in-depth basketball knowledge to get the edge. At the end of the day, however, there is one winner and many losers.

Wordle: Finding the Right Words to Say

13 minute read

Published:

The Wordle trend has grabbed the attention of an omicron laden society stumbling their way into a new year. It is a fun word game by Josh Wardle where each day a new word is released for people to guess. The daily release schedule, minified design, and simple game mechanics have made the game a viral hit.

2021

Homemade Noises Part 1: Making Things Louder

5 minute read

Published:

Messing around with guitar pedals and finding fun sound combinations is a blast and often a needed distraction from practicing. Pedals, however, are expensive at $100-300 a pop, which makes it rather difficult to own enough to play around with (or any at all in my case). Guitar stores will let you try some, but it is cumbersome to set up a chain in a store and they will eventually kick you out.

Visualizing the Simplex Algorithm

13 minute read

Published:

The simplex algorithm is a fundamental result in linear programming and optimization. Being remarkably efficient the algorithm quickly became a popular technique for solving linear programs. Having an optimal algorithm is essential, since linear programming is ubiquitous in business analytics, supply chain management, economics, and other important fields. In addition to being efficient the algorithm has a clean and intriguing visual intuition. I will first give some background on linear programs, then show how we can visualize their solution space, and finally how to utilize this to solve linear programs.

2020

Baby Yoda’s Plot

less than 1 minute read

Published:

After enjoying the incredible season 2 finale of The Mandalorian I was inspired to represent baby yoda in his truest form: mathematical.

Visualizing Gradient Descent and Its Descendants

8 minute read

Published:

Gradient descent has become ubiquitous in computer science recently largely due to its use in training neural networks. While neural networks are somewhat complex, gradient descent is a very simple, intuitive tool.

On Graph Theory and Social Distancing

22 minute read

Published:

COVID-19 has posed unique challenges to the world and forced people to adapt to new ways of living. For example social distancing has become the norm in public spaces. In the U.S. keeping people 6 feet apart has become a rigid requirement in any social gathering. While sitting at some of these events, I have started to wonder: is this socially distanced arrangement optimal? So I began to investigate.

Cooking with Artificial Ingredients

10 minute read

Published:

Sometimes meandering through the labyrinth of life is monotonous and in desperate need of being spiced up. However, this just leads us back to the age old question: what spices should I use?

The Digital Librarian

8 minute read

Published:

I love scouring old book stores for cool finds and oddities, but I often worry about missing a diamond in the rough. Unfortunately, there is not enough time to dive into every book in a shop and if we cannot judge a book by its cover, then how are we supposed to judge them by only the spine! As a true computer scientist I decided to build an over-the-top tool to help me out.

Artificial Poetic Intelligence

9 minute read

Published:

Humans are great at writing poetry. However, it takes years of reading and practice to develop a command of the language strong enough to produce great metaphor and imagery, while maintaining proper rythym and meter. Naturally, when faced with a difficult task and/or much effort we seek to automate it. So, can poetry writing be automated? Kind of…

Writings #7: Avatar: The Last Airbender

21 minute read

Published:

Part 7 in a collection of posts where I’ll give some of my thoughts and analysis on essays, short stories, novels, movies, etc. It is not really anything academic, but purely for me to practice my writing.

Cholesky Decomposition, Combinatorics, and Fractals

7 minute read

Published:

Cholesky factorization is a core concept in linear algebra and frequently used to solve scientific computing problems. While seemingly the furthest thing from Pascal’s triangle and binomial coefficients there is an interesting link using results from a path finding problem. Furthermore, this can be extended to create fractals and other lovely patterns.

Code Art

15 minute read

Published:

A fun hobby of mine is trying to create art with code. I am quite poor at the standard approach to art, so I am fond of using what I am good at to create aesthetically pleasing things. It is also fun to just try random things and see what pops out. I particularly appreciate techniques, which expose structure unexpectedly. One example of this is writing functions for red, green, and blue, which take a pixel coordinate and map it to a color value. Just this simple method can create some beautiful and quite unexpected images.

Cholesky Decomposition

4 minute read

Published:

Cholesky decomposition is the factorization of a positive-definite, Hermitian matrix into the product of a lower triangular matrix and its conjugate transpose. It is useful in numerous applications including solving linear systems, optimization, and monte-carlo simulations.

Understanding the Roofline Model

8 minute read

Published:

The Roofline Model is a performance model seeking to give the limitations of a specific hardware component in terms of algorithm performance. The model is often employed visually as a log-log plot of Arithmetic Intensity vs Flops/s.

2019

All Reduce

6 minute read

Published:

All-Reduce is the operation of reducing some data across nodes and finishing with the resulting reduction available on all processes.

Writings #6: Ulysses

2 minute read

Published:

Part 6 in a collection of posts where I’ll give some of my thoughts and analysis on essays, short stories, novels, movies, etc. It is not really anything academic, but purely for me to practice my writing.

Writings #5: Inglorious Bastards

1 minute read

Published:

Part 5 in a collection of posts where I’ll give some of my thoughts and analysis on essays, short stories, novels, movies, etc. It is not really anything academic, but purely for me to practice my writing.

Writings #4: Fracture

2 minute read

Published:

Part 4 in a collection of posts where I’ll give some of my thoughts and analysis on essays, short stories, novels, movies, etc. It is not really anything academic, but purely for me to practice my writing.

Writings #3: Who Am I This Time?

3 minute read

Published:

Part 3 in a collection of posts where I’ll give some of my thoughts and analysis on essays, short stories, novels, movies, etc. It is not really anything academic, but purely for me to practice my writing.

Writings #2: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

4 minute read

Published:

Part 2 in a collection of posts where I’ll give some of my thoughts and analysis on essays, short stories, novels, movies, etc. It is not really anything academic, but purely for me to practice my writing.

Writings #1: The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

1 minute read

Published:

Part 1 in a collection of posts where I’ll give some of my thoughts and analysis on essays, short stories, novels, movies, etc. It is not really anything academic, but purely for me to practice my writing.

Writings #0: Harrison Bergeron

1 minute read

Published:

Part 0 in a collection of posts where I’ll give some of my thoughts and analysis on essays, short stories, novels, movies, etc. It is not really anything academic, but purely for me to practice my writing.