The Cranachan Deck: Computer Science & AI

Ah, Scottish cranachan. For those of you (like me) who didn’t know, it is pronounced like this: CRAH-nuh-khen.

In my last post I said that the minute I wrapped my head around the AI/math hullabaloo I would write a post called I Sorted It All Out.

I have not sorted it all out.

I have also never made cranachan, or any for dessert for matter. But here is a video recipe.

Instead of sorting it all out, I thought I could lay bare the doodles and thought processes behind the computer science deck. In real time!

There will be 58 cards, again, because 58 cards fit nicely in the box and I would like all the boxes to be the same width. This way you can display them on a bookshelf and people will say things like “Wow you have great taste in dessert!” and be none the wiser that they are talking about math.

Computer Science/AI is a big topic and maybe I should focus on one the other. We will see how it goes. Here are some of the words on my radar — a nice mix of high and low, I think. I’ll probably whittle this way down and add more:

byte, attention, Koblitz curve, Hello World!, algorithm, node, transformer, Hopfield network, Boole, Python, qubit, Shor’s algorithm, data structure, bubble sort, minimum spanning tree, Big O, for-loop, while-loop, class, data frame, object, array, time series analysis, tree, gate, string, language, LLM, neural network, heaps, stacks, iterate, linked lists, secp256k1 (maybe — might go in Koblitz), Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange algorithm, mamba, transformer architecture, hash function, Java, C, Donald Knuth, Alan Turing, P = NP…

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, one of my favorite writers is Lydia Davis. Lydia Davis has mastered the short story — the really short story (see Long Story Short in The New Yorker, the place that keeps rejecting me).

My blurbs are always an exercise in Lydia Davis-ifying dense topics. So here we go!

The Koblitz Curve

I encountered Koblitz curves while reading a piece on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), a subject co-invented by Neal Koblitz.

The front of this card will say, I think, Cooking the Koblitz Curve. I like the alliteration and it popped into my head right away, which is usually how these things go. Here’s a mock-up: