About a month ago, I received an email with the subject, “Configure alternative cost management method(s) for App Engine projects by July 24, 2021.” After skimming it, I decided to star it in Gmail and move on with life; maybe the COVID-19 global pandemic would be over before then and this task would rise above […]
Unless one has been living on Antarctica for the last few months, life has probably been affected by COVID-19 in some way, shape or form. It has been almost 7 weeks since the company I work for issued a recommended work from home (WFH) notice and I have not been into the office since. The […]
Previously I wrote about a board game our daughter enjoys playing, Hi Ho! Cherry-O. One of the things that makes it somewhat uninteresting to adults is the lack of any applicable strategy; luck completely determines the outcome. Another game she enjoys is The Sneaky Snacky Squirrel. While luck determines much of the outcome, there are […]
As our daughter approaches 3 years old she has begun to play some simple board games, one of which is Hi Ho! Cherry-O. While playing it recently my wife lamented that the game was taking forever to end. The analysis in the Wikipedia page is for a single player, but the majority of the time […]
Towards the end of last year I signed up for the “basic” track of the Stanford Engineering Introduction To Artificial Intelligence class, mainly out of curiosity, but also because the instructors (Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig) and I share the same employer. I intended to follow along at a leisurely pace, unsure if I would […]
Every now and then it’s useful to challenge oneself, to grow, to stretch. A couple of months ago, a friend of mine noticed a McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Arby’s within spitting distance of each other, a trifecta of sorts. Then came the eureka moment, where he envisioned combining a Big Mac, Double Down and […]
A some point last year I became infatuated with a game commonly known as Flood-It by a company called LabPixies. My obsession resulted in the creation of a clone I call C O L O R F L O W which addresses the major faults I found with the game, namely there was no way […]
Problem #18, find the greatest sum of numbers along a path in a triangle of numbers, looks like a standard tree search problem. However, there’s a note at the bottom stating a brute force method won’t work for a harder/bigger version in problem #67. So I decided to skip the exercise of writing the tree […]
About a month ago, I came across a post from Jon McLoone on the Wolfram Blog where he detailed his method for finding the 25 best Hangman words. His metric was the percentage of games his computer algorithm would fail to guess a given word. His results make sense; short words with low frequency characters […]
Last month I went on a few training hikes for an upcoming backpacking trip, and on the final two, I took along my GPS. Google Earth provides a wealth of options for visualizing GPS data, but I wanted to get a better understanding of what was going on under the hood. So I exported my […]
