brainwagon

Find out a bit more about Google’s new free wireless broadband service! Frankly, I bet it stinks.

I have thought about dusting off my never-finished (or even really started) checkers program that I aborted work on about three years ago. I basically know very little about checkers, but the rules are a little more straightforward, which makes creation of a checkers program of average quality probably slightly easier than writing a chess […]

Claude Shannon’s paper Programming a computer to play chess from 1950. Good stuff from the history of computer science. [tags]Claude Shannon, Chess[/tags] Addendum: A terrific collection of computer chess links. Addendum2: An equally famous paper was Arthur Samuel’s 1959 publication on writing a Checkers program. Unlike Shannon’s work, Samuel was interested in creating a checkers […]

Cool. Scans of Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of Puzzles. Neat! Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of Puzzles [tags]Puzzles[/tags]

I was bored with the scouting reports on XM this morning, so I surfed over to channel 200 where Bob Dylan was playing music with a baseball theme. One of the songs that he played was Teddy Reynolds singing “Strike one”, which is all about pitcher Don Newcombe. I wasn’t paying too much attention, and […]

such that no queen attacks any other queen. It’s a simple (really simple) program to write, but I can’t remember having done it. So I did it. And then I had to make a picture of one of the solutions. [tags]8 queens, Python, trivial, waste of time[/tags] Addendum: Wikipedia has a page on the puzzle, […]

Thanks to Tom for calling this to my attention.

A few weeks ago, I remember this research getting a bit of press, but I didn’t have the time to track down the link to the actual report, rather than reading the rather unhelpful press summaries of the work. Here’s a link to the PDF. Their game theoretic model showed that the likely result of […]

Shame on you Major League Baseball. I was hoping to find a file that contained the date and times for all the major league games that would occur in the 2007 season. It turns out that they make it damned difficult to actually get a complete and accurate schedule. Sure, if you are interested in […]

I know it is incredibly gauche to still use ancient Unix utilities like calendar(1) to keep track of things, but then, I am incredibly gauche. I converted the .csv version of the Athletics schedule into a calendar file: you can download it here if you like. Just add a line to your .login script that […]

As you can tell, I’m on a bit of a mathematics bender lately. While digging around for new material, I found this rather nice bibliography of books that might be fun for the math enthusiast (there must be one or two of you out there). I have some of the books and like them, so […]

Over at Neighborhood of Infinity, there’s a mention that the Angels and Devil game might have been solved. Don’t know what it is? It’s a game played on an infinite checkboard. The Angel begins at the origin, and can move to any square that can be reached in k moves of a chess king. The […]

If you take the sequence of primes, and concatenate the first n of them together, how many of these are prime? It’s not hard to see that 2, 23, and even 2357 is prime. The next term has 355 digits: 235711131719232931374143475359616771737983899710110\ 310710911312713113713914915115716316717317918119119\ 319719921122322722923323924125125726326927127728128\ 329330731131331733133734734935335936737337938338939\ 740140941942143143343944344945746146346747948749149\ 950350952152354154755756356957157758759359960160761\ 3617619631641643647653659661673677683691701709719 The concatenation of primes up until 1033 also […]

Big deal you say? Strike the initial 3 off. The remaining number is also prime. Continue striking them off, one at a time. All the remaining numbers are also prime. The number above is the largest of the “left-truncatable primes”, of which there are precisely 4260. How do I know? I wrote a program to […]

Apparently a pretty serious pet food recall is underway. I caught this on the news, and since I’m such a softie for the well being of pets, I thought I’d give some more information here (it was difficult to find on my local tv news channel news website). Apparently wet and pouch style cat and […]