Daily Archives: 9/6/2002

Awari Solved

The University of Alberta has a very cool group that does research into gameplay. Recently they
solved Awari, a very old game that is still very common and popular in Africa and the West Indies. They did it by brutally enumerating all possible board positions via retrograde analyis on a cluster of 144 PCs in 51 hours. Not bad for a weekend’s worth of work.

Alphabet Soup

While surfing around on sweetcode today I found a link to a project called Alphabet Soup, a wacky project by Matt Chisolm that attempts to generate slightly perverse versions of regular characters using a context free grammar that describes possible characters. For instance, the following renditions of BRAINWAGON were made by his nifty script:










Pretty nifty, although I don’t think they will become my logo anytime real soon.

The Tower of Babel

I’ve been working a bit more on my weblog over the past few days, trying to clean up and remodularize the templates that I’ve been working on. As a result, I’ve got a stack of books on my desk regarding the various bits of web technology that I use. And it started me thinking. And as so often happens when I think, I feel the need to rant.

Why in the world do we have to know so much to make an attractive, interesting web page?

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