Discussion
I think that went well ... not sure who turned up, but if anyone reading this did turn up, I invite feedback. This may eventually become one of my regular talks, so I welcome the chance to make it the best I can, and avoid inflicting a poor quality talk on people.
No obligation, obvs.
@dougmerritt The basic idea was to talk briefly about five mostly unrelated things:
* Tortoise and Hare : Floyds cycle detection
* Modulo arithmetic
* Birthday problem/paradox
* Greatest Common Divisor
* Euclid's Algorithm
Obviously those last two are connected, and there are some connections, but then I brought them all together to describe Pollard's Rho method of finding a factor.
So the idea was to be a bit Chaos Goblin, but then bring it together, and demonstrate the algorithm live on a spreadsheet.
@dougmerritt I should probably write it up.
I enjoyed the talk, but especially the demonstration of different cases on the spreadsheet. Just possibly could be a little more of that, a little slower?
And the cases where Pollard Rho fails, that seems interesting, not sure one could say anything - how rare it is, perhaps?
There's a time inefficiency to the chasing around, which is justified (i think) by the saving in space - you mentioned that, but maybe worth a little more emphasis, as it very seems one is doing more work than necessary.
as you know, this wasn't entirely new territory to me, so I'm not quite the target audience.
@ColinTheMathmo
Pollard Rho is beautifully elegant, I love it.
@ColinTheMathmo
Congrats on that. Any comments for those of us who missed it?