# Hello, World!

Hello there. Considering the fact that this is my first post, don’t expect much. Blogging is a fairly new domain for me.

### Functional Programming beckons!

Somehow I have been very interested in Haskell lately. Maybe because of the fundamental idea that everything is a function or looking at this minimalist piece of code for Quick Sort :

quicksort [] = []
quicksort (p:xs) = (quicksort lesser) ++ [p] ++ (quicksort greater)
where
lesser = filter (< p) xs
greater = filter (>= p) xs


Since I am very new to this paradigm, I plan to take it up slowly and more effectively. We are also planning to use Haskell for our POP-II course project this semester, so that should be a good practice.

### Flag capturing with NIA

Our NITK CTF Team No Internet Access scaled new heights by finishing in the 84th position in the recently conducted Boston Key Party CTF 2015. Due to the exponential learning curve we graph after each event, I seem to have found a real passion and interest in Computer Security.

We are currently preparing for the Microsoft Build The Shield finals to be held at Hyderabad on the 20th of this month. It is going to be an Attack and Defense CTF and the first one for me and kbhat, so that will be immense fun. As a part of the Cryptography team of NIA, I am planning to start with completing an introductory course on Number theory and Cryptography. Let’s see how that goes.

### Parallel Computing

Currently the search for the algorithm to be parallelized is ongoing. Will update soon.

EDIT

We finished 12th in BTS! The event was well organised and it was a great learning experience. Hope to participate again next year!

We analysed the Knapsack Problem for our Parallel Computing Project and managed to gain some significant results by paralellising the Power Set generation while brute-forcing the solutions to the problem. We are further planning to implement a faster parallel algorithm which runs in O(2^(n/6)) time over the next semester or so.

The earlier write-ups are before I started blogging.