wheresrhys

I didn’t take the traditional route to my present career. After graduating in maths I knew I didn’t want to take the obvious route of becoming an actuary or accountant as maths, contrary to popular belief, is nothing remotely to do with adding up (although, in hindsight I reckon being an actuary might be fairly interesting, but you still have to mix with graduate training scheme types).

So many years later, after leaning web-wards through a series of charities and lower jobs, I find myself a reasonably competent web-developer.

But I still have a lot to learn and the book I’m reading (Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin) is proving to be a great source of ideas to stretch my programming legs. Making websites is all well and good, but the examples of complex systems emerging from simple rules, and the constant talk of computer models, has given me the impetus to stretch my abilities to making convoluted programs to model certain behaviours.

The first one I’ve attempted is the following scenario:

You have N buttons and an unlimited number of threads. You pick up 2 buttons and connect them with a thread, and then do this repeatedly.

So I wrote something to produce a graph of interesting things to keep track of during this process.

It’s also given me the idea for a jQuery plugin