Writing
13 posts. Older ones came back from a 2013 backup.
2019
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A Geometric One-Liner
Which boxes have a volume equal to their surface area? One line of Python finds them all, and a week of brute force can't find any more.
2017
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Siege!
Using a genetic algorithm to pick a troop allocation for FiveThirtyEight's Riddler castle-war puzzle.
2015
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72 Hours > Lifetime
Twenty-five years of wanting to make a video game, finally done in one Ludum Dare weekend.
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Jocks vs. Nerds
In a round-robin league, how many wins does it take to guarantee a playoff spot, and how few can still sneak you in?
2013
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Entropy: The opposite of chaos
Which image below looks more disorderly? Which seems more chaotic? Perhaps these seems like trick questions - they're not. They may seem like leading…
2012
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When Will This Game End?
As it turns out, the NCAA publishes every overtime game including the number of overtimes. We'll come back to this later, but I decided to ask a more…
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Derangement Can Solve Your Problems
Here is a very fun and surprising result which is not really new, but if you haven't seen it, you really should. The problem looks like this: I had a…
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Rage Faces and Math
A co-worker of mine recently emailed me a link to a rage face comic with the following: 'Is this always true??? I mean the math part... Stephen???' Knowing…
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The Story of Squaring a Triangle
Back in 1998, I overheard my high school math teacher musing to another teacher about the following problem: Given a line segment of unit length, select any…
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Learning to play Mancala
Because I love genetic algorithms and video games, I always wanted to create some artificial intelligence that learns to play a game. My first attempt is…
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Excel Dice Rolling Simulator
Probability distributions have a way of yielding unexpected and counter-intuitive results, so I thought it might be fun and instructive to build a…
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How long will it take to get to Free Parking?
According to the official rules of Monopoly, landing on the Free Parking space results in no action, however, many house rules include some sort of…
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Introduction: Games are fun
This blog will house projects and expositions about the intersection of math, computer science, and video games. For now, enjoy a short AMV created by yours…