brainwagon

If you are one of those people who leaves the ballpark early, all I can say is shame on you. SHAME! Today was an excellent example of why I don’t leave the ballpark early. After scoring two early against Andy Pettit, the A’s would eventually fall behind 4-2 going into the bottom of the ninth. […]

Well, I’ve got my first trivial attempts at alpha-beta search working, and my confidence in the general framework that I had constructed was growing, when I discovered that there are some circumstances where milhouse (which mostly just plays itself at the moment) seems to forget which side it is playing, and moves red checkers when […]

With white to have the first move, my checkers program was able to chart its way to a win for white. Here’s the log. It’s almost certainly chocked full of bugs, and is using a hideously childish evaluation function, and has no interface at all, but it’s making progress. [tags]Checkers,Programming,Alpha Beta Search[/tags]

Sure, it’s from 1910, but it’s a free atlas. Maps are kind of cool. Enjoy. People’s Handy Atlas of the World [tags]Public Domain,Project Gutenberg[/tags]

Sadly, one of my favorite authors has joined the choir invisible. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84 – BOOKS – MSNBC.com I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. Sleep well, Kurt. […]

Combinatorial Generation by Frank Luskey. Seems generally useful for a variety of puzzles that I have been pondering lately. Addendum: I didn’t find this very illuminating when I dig right down in it. The style of the pseudocode is very odd, as is the overall discussion of many of the topics.

I wanted to augment a webpage that I use to keep track of MLB games with team logos. Here they are.

I didn’t have much time to work on my checkers program this weekend. Still, in the back of my head, I was troubled by something: the random game player that I wrote revealed that red was winning somewhere around 55% of the total games. That disturbed me a little: I didn’t expect the assymetry of […]

My son innocently asked “was Hank Aaron really that good?” while they were flashing stats showing how various active players might have a shot at Aaron’s home run record. I said “yes, he really was”, and then ran a quick database query that produced the following career numbers: Hank Aaron|116.863636363636 Stan Musial|104.556818181818 Willie Mays|103.397727272727 Ty […]

The usual easy rule to deciding whether a particular book is under copyright (at least in the U.S.) is to examine its publication date: works published before 1923 are in the public domain. But there are many works published before 1964 whose copyright notices were not renewed, and these works are also in the public […]

In some of my reading up on checkers, I encountered this quotation from Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue: I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by a the elaborate frivolity of chess. […]

Thomas Lincke invented a technique called “drop-out-expansion” for the automatic construction of opening books. That seemed like a pretty nifty thing: it’s used by Martin Fierze’s Cake program to compute a vast database of opening positions in checkers. I wanted to know what it was about, and my Google Fu revealed this thesis: Exploring the […]

Dodgen and Trice talk about their 7 piece perfect play endgame database, which can be used to guarantee wins or stall defeats as long as possible when confronted by positions having 7 or fewer pieces. Most endgame databases contain only the game theoretic value for positions, and therefore might have difficulty actually finding the winning […]

Truly, this guy has more metachlorians than I do. BattleBricks: WiigoBot, The Perfect Game [tags]Wii,Lego[/tags]

Courtesy of The Unapologetic Magician, check out George Bell’s paper Solving Peg Solitaire on arxiv.org. [tags]Mathematical Recreations,Games[/tags]