Euler Paths

I had the fine pleasure of sharing the train home today with resident apprentice Will Warner. We got to enjoy a little Japanese conversation, but mostly we talked about programming. Will shared some of his experiences as a C++ programmer writing large test suites for simulating various types of chips, and how he was able to use the idea of a Euler Path to help write tests that could guarantee a certain coverage of possible test scenarios.

The first time I learned about Euler Paths was in a discrete math course at Wichita State University - from a teacher named Mark Arrasmith. He blends a brilliant display of technical and traditional teaching vectors into his math presentations and are freely available on his web site.

A Euler Path is a path such that it traverses over every node in a circuit, or system. Here are a few examples of Euler Paths:

There is a family of famous Euler Path problems like this one:

I received my HTTP server challenge from Micah today. It’s due next Tuesday. I’m excited about it, but first, I’ve got to finish rewiring the Limelight interface to now work with the new design changes Micah asked me to implement for my tic tac toe library. I’ll be glad to be done with tic tac toe for awhile, it’s been a great learning experience, but I think my brain is hungry for a new context to work in.