After seeing the video titled Two Guitarists, One Melody, my coworker Steve and I decided to replicate this experiment.

The basic premise is that one person would send two bars of melody to the other, the other person would continue with two bars of their own, and keep going back and forth until we had 16 bars of pure melody.

As you can see from the image above, our melody was a little bit more complex than what you see in the original video that was the inspiration. We tried to throw each other some deliberate curve balls (hello flats!), timings and 16th notes.

Once the melody was complete, each of us would independently try to incorporate it into our own song. Neither of us knew the direction we were taking this song until it was fully completed and produced.

Naturally, what Steve and I came up with sounded very different and distinct with an underlying similarity. Steve went with a dark piano theme while I opted for a Trans-Siberian Orchestra inspired heavy metal Christmas jingle.

Without further ado, here are our respective songs.

Steve:

Me:

Piggybacking onto my previous post about graphs and DFS and BFS, you may have noticed there is also a weight assigned to each edge in a graph. This is because I will talk about path-finding algorithms, starting with Dijsktra’s Algorithm. There are plenty of resources online, such as Wikipedia’s Description that do a fairly good job of describing the algorithm.

However, none of them explain the algorithm in a real world scenario, so I decided to describe it using a city whose beauty was distracting to my path orientation, causing me to constantly get lost: Prague, Czech Republic.

A section of Prague with a graph overlay

If you were planning a trip in a few blocks of that intersection, and all you had was this map, how would you get from, for example, point P to point W? Intuitively, you would look at A and all edges connected to it (without using an illustrated map, i.e. from a table), pick the lowest one and repeat.

Here is a PDF of Dijsktra’s Algorithm in Action and an animated GIF.

Dijsktra Animation

And finally, the updated code in PHP.