Finding all the words on a Boggle board is a classic computer programming problem. With a fast Boggle solver, local optimization techniques such as hillclimbing and simulated annealing can be used to find particularly high-scoring boards. The sheer number of possible Boggle boards has historically prevented an exhaustive search for the global optimum board. We apply Branch and Bound and a decision diagram-like data structure to perform the first such search. We find that the highest-scoring boards found via hillclimbing are, in fact, the global optima.
Multi-armed bandits a simple but very powerful framework for algorithms that make decisions over time under uncertainty. This book provides a more introductory, textbook-like treatment of the subject, covering IID and adversarial rewards, contextual bandits, and connections to economics.
We present jump consistent hash, a fast, minimal memory, consistent hash algorithm that can be expressed in about 5 lines of code. In comparison to the algorithm of Karger et al., jump consistent hash requires no storage, is faster, and does a better job of evenly dividing the key space among the buckets and of evenly dividing the workload when the number of buckets changes. Its main limitation is that the buckets must be numbered sequentially, which makes it more suitable for data storage applications than for distributed web caching.
