[GTALUG] programming system questions

[David Thornton]

This is a chance for me to test my understanding by trying to explain it
myself.

Monte Carlo is where you randomly choose solutions from a solution space
and then try to make the results better for each choice.

Imagine you are trying to find the highest point on earth. Rather than scan
the entire earth to find the highest point, you choose a sample of points
and then see if there is something higher near-by.

This is _in general_ more efficient than scanning the whole earth, but of
course there is a change that you miss Everest.

Consider the alternative approach of choosing a point and then looking for
higher points nearby ( aka Gradient Descent). Suppose you started somewhere
in Britain... you might scan the local area and come to the conclusion that
snowdon is the highest place in the world.

Now image that you do this 100 time, and then compare the local bests of
those 100 attempts. You are more likely to find the highest point. That's
monte carlo I think.

Anyway, I'm not sure this has anything to do with what the OP is talking
about.

If I understand he/she wants to recreate an app.  Does that mean reverse
engineer? Are you trying to recreate someone else's app without direct
access to that app?

Are you trying to examine interactions with the app and predict what the
app will do, and hence "simulate" the app?

You might also consider creating a _smart_ proxy, that lets you cache
results locally such that if you ask for the same thing a second time it's
comes back faster.

Additionally by implementing a proxy , you can populate your own copy of
what ever data the original service is providing and study that for the
purposes of reverse engineering.

This sounds like a great conversation to have over a $drink, and/or in
front of a white board.

David



On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 9:19 AM ac via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 11 Oct 2018 07:53:18 -0500
> o1bigtenor via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> > Greetings
> >
> Hello :)
>
> > I have been using a web application for one of my business functions.
> > Besides the limitation of it being a web application (the web is NOT
> > as consistent nor as quick as is considered 'normal' for those that
> > like in rural areas) there are to many areas where I need to tweak the
> > results. Therefore I would like to re-create this application.
> >
> on the web?
>
> > At its base its somewhat like a recipe system. I plan on using
> > postgresql for data holding and now what might be a good way of now
> > doing the work.
> >
> i love postgresql :)
>
> > Think that an item has from 5 to 50 of 50 information fields. I am
> > adding a number of items together and specifying quantities of each
> > item trying to achieve levels that I previously specified.
> > The present application uses css and javascript and some other things
> > that are on the 'home' (program owner's) server.
> > Hopefully this description is clear enough and gives enough
> > information so that suggestions might be forthcoming. (I asked an
> > engineer friend and his suggestion was to use a monte carlo type of
> > system but that would be several levels more complex that I think
> > might be necessary for this application.)
> >
> i refuse to google "monte carlo type system" on duckduckgo.com...
> please put me out of my misery and tell me what a monte carlo type
> system is? ( I do love Monte Carlo also :) )
>
> Andre
>
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-- 
David Thornton
https://wiki.quadratic.net
https://github.com/drthornt/
https://twitter.com/northdot9/
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