# Learning by rote

## :sunglasses:

Calculus is full of formulae. As a mundane necessity of examination sometimes those formulae must be committed to memory. I remember remembering . On first sight, it looked huge! How would I ever be able to reproduce something so arcane just from memory? After I looked again, it didn’t seem so bad.

After a period, I had it down pat.

Because these were the GCSE days, when much learning seemed like repetition “until it sinks in” without really understanding the significance of the thing, we learned by rote. This was before the politics of how something was learned would have struck any kind of chord with us; we just wanted to be outside.

It seems the time for learning by rote has come round again, this time with a vengeance. Now I need to get down not one, not two, but twelve formulae (granted, they are simple compared to the quadratic formula, but still).

How am I going to drum that lot into my head? I could print it out on a pocket-sized sheet of paper and gaze lovingly at it when on the tube. Better yet, I’m an adult now, so I could just get it tattooed to my wrist. But wait, why not use the computer to do the drumming for me.

I want to be asked what the corresponding function is for a derivative and what the derivative for a function is at regular intervals. Why don’t I just modify my shell to ask me to give an answer before I am allowed to carry on.

Not being able to respond that the derivative of is within a few seconds would begin to burden my productivity if I didn’t start learning ...

Challenge accepted!

The issue is that if I’m being asked the question in the terminal, then I’ll have to cope with doing the translation of the LaTeX markup in my head. It would be quite nice to display a little X window with a pretty, rendered SVG.

Unix philosophy to the rescue; there’s a little binary that comes with ImageMagick that can do what we want.

The behaviour is going to be dead simple; when a new shell is invoked, open a window showing a random SVG of some , wait for the window to be closed, wait for some LaTeX input, check aforementioned input against the expected value. If the answer is correct, exit. If the answer is wrong then show the correct answer along with the question , wait for the window to be closed, exit.

The first job we have is to put together a table of questions, answers in LaTeX markup and render SVGs for the questions and the questions with their answers .

f(x) f'(x)
x^n nx^{n - 1}
\sin x \cos x
\cos x -\sin x
\tan x \sec^2 x
\sec x \sec x\tan x
\mathrm{cosec} x -\mathrm{cosec} x \cot x
\cot x -\mathrm{cosec}^2 x
e^x e^x
\ln x \frac{1}{x}
\arcsin x \frac{1}{\sqrt{1 - x^2}}
\arccos x -\frac{1}{\sqrt{1 - x^2}}
\arctan x \frac{1}{1 + x^2}

Luckily, I’ve got some code hanging about that will take a LaTeX string like we have above and return an SVG string with the notation I need to be able to recognise. I just need to loop through the table above spitting out SVG files for questions and questions with their answers .

Because I don’t really want to write out a file called \frac{1}{1 + x^2}, I’m just going to make a short hash of the LaTeX string and use that as the file name. I can use the same idea to check the veracity of the answer provided.

So, let’s represent the above as a mapping in Python, and render the SVGs we need:

from bade.directives.eqtexsvg import eqtexsvg
import hashlib

fx_fdx = {
'x^n':               'nx^{n - 1}',
'\\sin x':           '\\cos x',
'\\cos x':           '-\\sin x',
'\\tan x':           '\\sec^2 x',
'\\sec x':           '\\sec x\\tan x',
'\\mathrm{cosec} x': '-\\mathrm{cosec} x \\cot x',
'\\cot x':           '-\\mathrm{cosec}^2 x',
'e^x':               'e^x',
'\\ln x':            '\\frac{1}{x}',
'\\arcsin x':        '\\frac{1}{\\sqrt{1 - x^2}}',
'\\arccos x':        '-\\frac{1}{\sqrt{1 - x^2}}',
'\\arctan x':        '\\frac{1}{1 + x^2}',
}

hashes = {}

for fx, fdx in fx_fdx.items():
# write f(x) to file
fx_hash = 'q-' + hashlib.sha1(fx.encode('utf8')).hexdigest()[:7]
fx_svg = eqtexsvg("\$${0} \$$".format(fx), inline=False)
with open(fx_hash, 'w') as fx_fh:
fx_fh.write(fx_svg)

# write f(x) = f'(x) to file
fdx_hash = hashlib.sha1(fdx.encode('utf8')).hexdigest()[:7]
fdx_svg = eqtexsvg("${0} = {1}$".format(fx, fdx), inline=False)
with open(fdx_hash, 'w') as fdx_fh:
fdx_fh.write(fdx_svg)

# remember association of hashes
hashes[fx_hash] = fdx_hash

for fx_hash, fdx_hash in hashes.items():
print("{0} {1}".format(fx_hash, fdx_hash))


Easy-peasy. A bunch of files just got written to the directory we ran the script in and the script printed a pretty map that tells us about the associations between the files that were written:

q-189199f c65ec7a
q-5600f00 d849a01
q-67fd40d 5600f00
q-a297bb9 b82f717
q-43630ee 61d8e53
q-26d1990 566261d
q-1624dce 1624dce
q-bd04e97 d261fd4
q-d6d9338 5edd4ce
q-0741fac e9e9dc6
q-4f1ae87 2ba2cbb


The q- prefix is to cover the case where an answer is the same as the question (ie. ).

Now to write the program to flash these images and check answers. Because this is going to frequently interrupt me whilst I am doing things, it needs to be pretty snappy if it’s not going to be get on my nerves. So, let’s write it in Rust. We can do that by mostly copy‘n’pasting code from documentation.

Let’s represent our above associations between question and answer with a std::collections::HashMap, almost as nice as writing a literal :wink:

let mut fx_fdx = HashMap::new();

fx_fdx.insert("q-0741fac", "e9e9dc6");
// ...
fx_fdx.insert("q-d6d9338", "5edd4ce");


We also need to randomly select from the above, there’s code in the crate docs for doing that, and we can has a destructuring assignment like Python and ES6:

extern crate rand;

let (fx, fdx) = sample(&mut rng, fx_fdx, 1).pop().unwrap();


Next we need to flash images using display, for which we use std::process::Command in Rust. We’ll need to do this for both questions and answers, so let’s write a function taking a file name:

fn display (name: &str) {
Command::new("display")
.arg("-border").arg("10")
.arg("-bordercolor").arg("white")
.arg(name)
.output()
.unwrap_or_else(|e| { panic!("{}", e) });
}


This function doesn’t actually need to return anything, since we just halt execution whilst the user (me) looks at the image being flashed up. Again, getting input from the user is just :spaghetti: from the docs. I won’t reproduce it here. Once we have the answer provided, we need to hash it and compare the obtained hash with the expected hash. Another tiny function, writ large:

extern crate sha1;
use sha1::Sha1;

fn compare (input: String, fdx: &str) -> bool {
let mut input_sha1 = Sha1::new();
input_sha1.update(input.as_bytes());
fdx.as_bytes() == input_sha1.hexdigest()[..7].as_bytes()
}


This is where my Rust gets a little hazy. Should I cast both things to bytes here? I don’t know, please feel free to PR against this post if there’s a suggestion!

Now we have everything we need and just need to write the logic combining our compare and display functiongs for showing the answer (in case of an incorrect answer) or just exiting:

match compare(input, fdx) {
true => {},
false => display(fdx)
};


Look on GitHub to see the whole thing put together. I simply add a line to my ~/.zshrc to execute the binary every time a new shell boots up and there we have it, auto-revision!