Diggin' Ruby

I'm taking a data mining class at the U of Mn, and for one recent problem set, we had to determine some cluster shapes that present reasonable clusters but score poorly on the silhouette coefficient (see page 541 of the PDF). I had some ideas of cluster shapes that wouldn't work well, but I wanted to validate that. It didn't take that long to whip up a bit of ruby code that explored the two shapes that I wanted to test out, and sure enough, they behaved the way I wanted them to.

Laying down the code went very quickly; the only issues I had were because of my lower level of familiarity with the Ruby class libraries compared to Java. However, I never had to leave TextMate to do this; doing it in a java IDE would have taken longer. Of course, this is old news to lots of people, but it was nice to have an excuse to play with ruby a bit more than I usually get to.