In a previous post, I promised to write about testing the quality of pseudo-random number sequences.  I'll post later about some of the statistical tests often used, but I first wanted to mention a sort of practical test one can do. One of the many things you might want to do with pseudorandomly generated numbers is Monte Carlo integration/simulatation/etc.  As mentioned by acer in this comment, Monte Carlo integration can be shown to work better with some of the pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) which are considered inferior in a statistical sense.  In this post, we will play with a simple Monte Carlo approximation of π.

I would like to see a valid reason for having the thumbs down voting for an original first posted question.

Thumbs down, because it's not a good question? (That's not a good reason)  Thumbs down because bad code? (but that would be cleared up in the answers)  Thumbs down because ...

It's apparent the administrator will not get rid of the thumbs voting system (sigh).  As a compromise I would like to suggest as I have above, remove...

There are two pieces of extended functionality that I quite often want from the Maple Compiler. The first (task A) is to be able to link in and use an arbitrary function from some other external ("3rd party") shared library, within my Compile'd Maple procedure. The second (task B) is to directly call the compiled Maple procedure from within some computational routine in a 3rd party shared library (which I would then access using define_external). This post is about the first of those, task A.

I just updated MaplePrimes to have a Print-Specific CSS file that fixes a bug in Firefox that was stopping more than one page printing. This also improves the quality of printouts for all browsers because it removes the sidebar, footer and header links. It also extends the main content to take up the whole width of the page.

You will only see this change when printing a page from Primes, it does not change the appearance of the site when browsing normally.

A recent comment addition of mine adding comments (in parse lists) did not update the last action in the thread, there is a 3 hour difference.

I get what appear to be redundant email notifications from MaplePrimes.  Possibly an email is sent whenever anything changes in a thread to which I have responded, however, I'd prefer to get emails only if a response has been edited or a new response added.  That is, I don't need an email for a thumbs up/down addition (if that is the cause). Could that be added as a configuration option?

A user recently asked how to find the set of indices corresponding to a given value of a two-dimensional Array.

There are several ways to handle this problem.  For  a single value, a simple scan through the Array suffices:

FindIndices1 := proc(A :: Array, val)
local i,j,irng,jrng;
    (irng,jrng) := rtable_dims(A);
    {seq(seq(`if`(A[i,j]=val, [i,j], NULL), i=irng), j=jrng)};
end proc:

With a multi-core machine, the ...

The hardest and/or most important part of answering a question is making sure the real question is understood. The July 1, 2010 question Using fsolve with a dispersion relation posted to MaplePrimes seemed to be about obtaining a numeric solution of an equation. Turns out it was more a question about the behavior of an implicit function.

I recently celebrated my 10-year anniversary at Maplesoft. I've enjoyed my time here, working with a terrific group of colleagues, and I hope to be here for many more years to come. Part of the satisfaction comes from being able to interact with this wonderful user community.

I also celebrated the 20th anniversary of the plot code, parts of which I've had the pleasure of maintaining and improving over the past 10 years. Actually, I believe it is closer to 25 years old...

We need an area to create polling questions on this forum. 

I find it very odd that this forum which is not very graphic intensive runs so slowly.  It runs like there's animated ads running in the background slowing things down, but this is a text forum with the odd graphic in the threads but hardly anything else.  I can't see why it can't work so much faster.

Why must one have high speed and the latest browser for this site to work marginally well?  Load times for the home page should load almost instantly, on...

The MRB constant is defined at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MRBConstant.html.

On about Dec 31, 1998 I computed 1 digit of the MRB constant with my TI-92's, by adding 1-sqrt(2)+3^(1/3)-4^(1/4) as far as I could. That first digit by the way is just 0.

On Jan 11, 1999 I computed 3 digits of the MRB constant with the Inverse Symbolic Calculator.

restart; interface(version);
  Classic Worksheet Interface, Maple 12.02, Windows, Dec 10 2008 Build ID 377066

B:=binomial(x,k)/binomial(-x,k);

convert(B, GAMMA);
simplify(%);
% assuming x::integer;

                                  0

#but

Create a maplet or worksheet for the game Blokus. 

On that note, we should have a counter or tally in the post to show how many people want to work on or are attempting to work on the challenge.  That way people can see if there is progress happening behind the scenes.

Jacques' post on the maple.vim project spurred this post.  Vim users cannot have all the fun.

About a year ago I wrote an Emacs front-end for the Maple debugger.  I've used it since---it is now my primary debugging tool for Maple code.  What it does is allow stepping through interpreted Maple code in an Emacs buffer.  That is, rather than being presented with a single line of...