burrows

It’s rare that a demo hooks me in as quickly as Mouthwashing did. Sure, plenty of games have solid slices showcasing a few cool gameplay elements that make me intrigued, curious, or interested to see the final build. But it’s really rare for a demo to feel so crafted that it might as well be a standalone work, impressive in-and-of-itself, outside the bounds of previewing. Horror games are usually the ones that thrive in that space. Some of my most well-remembered demos, like Signalis, Slay the Princess, and the two…

The magical algorithm to index and compress large string data then find substrings quicklyPhoto by SOULSANA on UnsplashThe Burrows Wheeler Transform (BWT) was developed in 1994 by Michael Burrows and David Wheeler. In simple terms, BWT is a string transformation that acts as a preprocessing step for lossless compression. BWT has implementations that exhibit both a linear O(n) performance and space complexity. Originally designed to prepare data for compression with techniques like bzip2, BWT has found prominence in…

It was thought that humans were unique amongst mammals when it came to farming – but depending on how strict we are with definitions, it turns out we might not be alone when comes to tending the land to grow food.  Scientists have discovered that pocket gophers (Geomys pinetis) also practice a form of agriculture.Measurements on a field containing burrows built by the little critters suggest they don't just harvest the longleaf pine roots that grow into their homes – they cultivate them.At hundreds of meters long, those…