brainwagon

Okay, I woke up this morning, and decided to code up a version of a MasterMind solver. About fifteen minutes later, I had this tremendously slow implementation, which nevertheless seems to solve patterns very pretty quickly (averaged just 4.71 guesses in the short run of 100 trials that I just ran. It’s tremendously slow though, [...]

Over at the Programming Praxis blog, the task of the day is to write a program to solve the game Mastermind. Mastermind is actually a fairly interesting game mathematically speaking, and has a fairly rich set of mathematics behind it, and yet it’s actually small enough to analyze easily using modern computing power. I might [...]

Work on my checkers program milhouse has stalled a bit: I have a problem in the transposition tables that is fighting against my endgame database attempt, and it’s subtle enough that I haven’t had time to work it out. I’ve been relaxing by reading some more about other board games, and have begun to read [...]

I don’t know if any of you have noticed that you can see some of the things that I’ve posted on the current day in previous years on the left. I find it nice to recycle topics which I might have talked about in previous years and bring them back to the top of my [...]

Here’s a page that answered some of my questions about Sudoku. Sudoku enumeration Now, if only it could answer the most pressing question I have: why am I so slow at them? Technorati Tags: Puzzles, Recreational Math, Sudoku

According to digg, pong is celebrating its 34th anniversary today. Feh. I’m older than that. Sniffle. Bonus links: Wikipedia has some nice info, including a link to William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two game developed at Brookhaven National Labs. Oh, and the animated gif on the right? Screendumps from the CHIP-8 emulator I wrote a few [...]

Ben Fry has some cool graphics which visualize the code in several old Atari 2600 video games. Basically, he disassembles code and marks all possible branches with arcs between the lines of code, and changes all data tables to graphical representations of the bit patterns, revealing many sprites and other data tables. I dunno how [...]

Zome is a nerd toy that allows you create all sorts of amazing polyhedral models. Some people are more serious about them than others. Addendum: A couple of days ago, I picked up one of those generic “ball bearing and magnet” sets that allow you to build similar structures at Walgreens. It was $9.99 for [...]

Wow. Very cool to take this step back in time and see what young hackers in 1913 were doing. A lot of lame stuff, but some gems, like a line harmonograph, a “key card” for writing secret codes on post cards, handcutting gears and racks for models, a miniature “Pepper’s Ghost”, and a homemade water [...]

A classic of puzzles (most of which I would call only marginally mathematical) Amusements In Mathematics, by Henry Ernest Dudeney. has been made available via Project Gutenberg. Lots of puzzles having to do with geometric dissection, board games, and a host of other topics. Very nice.

May you be touched by his noodly appendage. Hint: use the shadow to determine if you are over your converts.

My best was 681 930 982 feet. Does playing this make me a bad person?

I was in Fry’s last weekend, and was just browsing the cheap video game aisle’s with my wife, when I noticed that the quirky Japanese title Katamari Damacy was only $19.99. I think it was Tom who first told me about this rather odd little game, and when I explained what it was to my [...]

Half shadow puppet theater, half first person shooter: Deanimator. Link courtesy of Dan.

Where your host expounds about his largely academic interest in games of chance. Links: ::amazon(“0394703103″, “Beat the Dealer, by Ed Thorp”):: The classic, pick up a copy and read on the flight to Vegas. You can and should read his Mathematics of Gambling as well, especially since it’s available online for free. ::amazon(“0929712137″, “The Theory [...]