GSoC Coding Phase 2 Blog 1
Google Summer of Code 2020’s first evaluation is completed. I passed!!! Hurray! Now we are in the mid way of the second evaluation. This post discusses about the progress so far in the first two weeks of the second coding period from 30 June to 12 July 2020. Completion of the matplotlib_baseline_images package We successfully created the matplotlib_baseline_images package. It contains the matplotlib and the matplotlib toolkit baseline images. Symlinking is done for the baseline images, related changes for Travis, appvoyer, azure pipelines etc.
Finalizing the Held-Karp Relaxation
This should be my final post about the Held-Karp relaxation! Since my last post titled Implementing The Held Karp Relaxation, I have been testing both the ascent method as well as the branch and bound method. My first test was to use a truly asymmetric graph rather than a directed graph where the cost in each direction happened to be the same. In order to create such a test, I needed to know the solution to any such proposed graphs.
Animate Your Own Fractals in Python with Matplotlib
Imagine zooming an image over and over and never go out of finer details. It may sound bizarre but the mathematical concept of fractals opens the realm towards this intricating infinity. This strange geometry exhibits the same or similar patterns irrespectively of the scale. We can see one fractal example in the image above. The fractals may seem difficult to understand due to their peculiarity, but that’s not the case. As Benoit Mandelbrot, one of the founding fathers of the fractal geometry said in his legendary TED Talk:
Implementing the Held-Karp Relaxation
I have now completed my implementation of the ascent and the branch and bound method detailed in the 1970 paper The Traveling-Salesman Problem and Minimum Spanning Trees by Micheal Held and Richard M. Karp. In my last post, titled Understanding the Ascent Method, I completed the first iteration of the ascent method and found an important bug in the find_epsilon() method and found a more efficient way to determine substitutes in the graph.
GSoC Coding Phase 1 Blog 2
Google Summer of Code 2020’s first evaluation is about to complete. This post discusses about the progress so far in the last two weeks of the first coding period from 15 June to 30 June 2020. Completion of the demo package We successfully created the demo app and uploaded it to the test.pypi. It contains the main and the secondary package. The main package is analogous to the matplotlib and secondary package is analogous to the matplotlib_baseline_images package as discussed in the previous blog.
Understanding the Ascent Method
It has been far longer than I would have prefered since I wrote a blog post. As I expected in my original GSoC proposal, the Held-Karp relaxation is proving to be quite difficult to implement. My mentors and I agreed that the branch and bound method discussed in Held and Karp’s 1970 paper The Traveling-Salesman Problem and Minimum Spanning Trees which first required the implementation of the ascent method because it is used in the branch and bound method.
Animated polar plot with oceanographic data
The ocean is a key component of the Earth climate system. It thus needs a continuous real-time monitoring to help scientists better understand its dynamic and predict its evolution. All around the world, oceanographers have managed to join their efforts and set up a Global Ocean Observing System among which Argo is a key component. Argo is a global network of nearly 4000 autonomous probes or floats measuring pressure, temperature and salinity from the surface to 2000m depth every 10 days.
implementing the Iterators
We are coming into the end of the first week of coding for the Summer of Code, and I have implemented two new, but related, features in NetworkX. In this post, I will discuss how I implemented them, some of the challenges and how I tested them. Those two new features are a spanning tree iterator and a spanning arborescence iterator. The arborescence iterator is the feature that I will be using directly in my GSoC project, but I though that it was a good idea to implement the spanning tree iterator first as it would be easier and I could directly refer back to the research paper as needed.
GSoC Coding Phase 1 Blog 1
I Sidharth Bansal, was waiting for the coding period to start from the March end so that I can make my hands dirty with the code. Finally, coding period has started. Two weeks have passed. This blog contains information about the progress so far from 1 June to 14 June 2020. Movement from mpl-test and mpl packages to mpl and mpl-baseline-images packages Initially, we thought of creating a mpl-test and mpl package.
Finding all Minimum Arborescences
There is only one thing that I need to figure out before the first coding period for GSoC starts on Monday: how to find all of the minimum arborescences of a graph. This is the set $$K(\pi)$$ in the Held and Karp paper from 1970 which can be refined down to $$K(\pi, d)$$ or $$K_{X, Y}(\pi)$$ as needed. For more information as to why I need to do this, please see my last post here.