PDL "takeover" at some point?

[mohawk2]

Hi, great to meet you again at LPW!

An idea from @duffee: would you be open to a PDL "takeover" (to use a social-media "thing") for one week's PWC?

[duffee]

Actually, I was thinking of taking a month at a time with 4 challenges along a theme, such as statistics, graph plotting or matrix manipulation. This would mean that people wouldn't lose their newly acquired knowledge and be able to use it in the following weeks. Probably starting with a simple task in the first week leading to more complex tasks later. It could take some effort to get into the PDL mindset.

I'd also want space them out a bit to avoid burnout because people like the range of topics.

[manwar]

@duffee @mohawk2 Great idea, please share more information.

[duffee]

Checking my incomplete notes, I was thinking of 4 questions on each of these topics:

1. Visualisations
2. Statistics
3. Matrix manipulations - exploring the rotation/translation/shear of vectors
4. specifically PDL challenges
5. Big Data modelled after the 1 Billion Rows Challenge

I've only got to sketching out the first topic and I'd welcome comments to make them better

Visualisations

There are 5 ideas here. Choose the 4 best or make all 5 good.

Histograms

Craps!

1. Roll 2 dice 100 times and plot the resulting frequency histogram.
2. Plot the CDF either as a histogram or as a curve. Bonus points for putting the curve on top of the frequency histogram.

Display images

1. Display an image of Messier 51, the Whirlpool galaxy, and add a label with an arrow to a bright spot.
2. Calculate the ratio of brightness of the central core to the spiral arms or disk.

Plotting

this one needs a lot more work

1. Plot the Mandelbrot set/Julia set on the region [..., …]
   Make suggestions on colouring and zooming

Plot points and fit a curve

1. Plot 100 points of the function sin(x) + rand(0.5) over the range [0, 2 pi]
2. Fit a smooth curve to those points (e.g. spline, moving average, LOESS)

3D plots

This one can be pretty, but we'll need to give people enough information to understand the challenge

1. Plot the surface of z = sin(r) / r, where r = sqrt(x**2 +y**2)
2. Plot a solution to the Lorentz attractor in 3 dimensions, given parameters of … needs an explanation of solving differential equations