I was watching the DNC Convention Roll Call on CNN, and noticed two interesting things:
1. Apparently the numbers on the screen are updated character-by-character as some dude types them in, instead of, say, having him/her press Enter after the total number is in. For example, when Florida cast 136 votes for Obama, here's what showed up:
316 to 317 to 329 to 452. Subtract the 316 that were already there, and you get 0, 1, 13, 136. I wonder what would happen if the person accidentally typed an extra number.
2. During the Hawaii vote, someone accidentally flipped the switch from "Democratic" to "Republican," which not only changed the candidate names, but also reset the "current state" marker back to Alabama. They then had to correct it back. I wonder if someone got in trouble for that mistake.
Therefore, theoretically, if you're trying to choose 4 out of 12 items, you can roll an eight-sided die three times, and 96.6796875% of the time you won't need to re-roll.
However, it's not particularly obvious how to map 495 of the 512 results onto choices of 4 items. Yes, you could have a massive look-up table with 495 rows, but that's a bit hard to carry around in your pocket.
So, I've come up with the following little "rule"... unfortunately, it's much more complex than I had hoped. Can anyone do better?
Let's call the 12 items you're trying to choose ABCDEFGHIJKL. Split them into two halves, ABCDEF and GHIJKL. Generally, we're going to have the first roll of the die tell us how many to choose from each half, with the other rolls telling us which ones.
Now, we'll roll the die three times, let's say the values are X, Y, and Z. Then:
If X == 1, then we're going to choose three items from ABCDEF, and one item from GHI.
If X == 2, then we're going to choose three items from ABCDEF, and one item from JKL.
If X == 3, then we're going to choose three items from GHIJKL, and one item from ABC.
If X == 4, then we're going to choose three items from GHIJKL, and one item from DEF.
If X == 5 through 8, then we'll either choose two items from both halves, or all items from the same half.
For the case of X == 1 through 4, we need to choose 3 out of a group of 6, and 1 out of a group of 3. Let's call the group of six MNOPQR, and the group of three STU.
If Y == 1 through 6, then we'll choose MNO based on the bit representation of Y. To wit:
Y == 1, choose --O.
Y == 2, choose -N-.
Y == 3, choose -NO.
Y == 4, choose M--.
Y == 5, choose M-O.
Y == 6, choose MN-.
After that, we'll have three choices of the group PQR (either 1 or 2 items, based on how many of MNO were chosen), and three choices of the group STU. We'll use the roll Z to put among those 9 choices -- simply put Z in base three, and choose among PQR and STU appropriately (using the mapping 012).
Since that's 8 outcomes to choose among 9 results, one will be leftover, namely, P and S. So let's use those for the case Y == 7:
Y == 7 and Z == 1: --O -QR S--
Y == 7 and Z == 2: -N- -QR S--
Y == 7 and Z == 3: -NO P-- S--
Y == 7 and Z == 4: M-- -QR S--
Y == 7 and Z == 5: M-O P-- S--
Y == 7 and Z == 6: MN- P-- S--
Y == 7 and Z == 7: MNO --- S--
Y == 7 and Z == 8: --- PQR S--
This leaves four cases left, and we'll map them to when Y == 8:
Y == 8 and Z == 1: MNO --- -T-
Y == 8 and Z == 2: MNO --- --U
Y == 8 and Z == 3: --- PQR -T-
Y == 8 and Z == 4: --- PQR --U
In the case where Y == 8 and Z > 4, reroll.
Now, when X is 5 through 8, we'll be choosing two items from each half (or four from the same half). It turns out there are 15 ways of choosing two items from a group of 6 (or four from a group of 6), and conveniently 15 just a little bit less then twice 8. I haven't found a good way to map numbers from 1 to 15 onto the 15 ways, so here's one that's as good as any:
So, now all we need are two numbers from 1 to 15. That's pretty easy, since we have the rolls Y and Z, which range from 1 to 8. Now use X to distinguish:
If X == 5, take Y and Z exactly.
If X == 6, add 8 to Z.
If X == 7, add 8 to Y.
If X == 8, add 8 to both Y and Z.
Now Y and Z are all in the range 1-16. So:
If both Y and Z are in the range 1-15, use Y to choose two items from ABCDEF and Z to choose two items from GHIJKL.
If Z == 16, then use Y to identify two items from ABCDEF; then choose the other four.
If Y == 16, then use Z to identify two items from GHIJKL; then choose the other four.
Finally, if both Y and Z are 16 (you rolled 8, 8, 8), then reroll.
What with the recent news of 600 shares of Lemon Technology being granted from Taylor Senior to Kimberly Taylor, I thought I would recap what we know about the stockholders:
Lemon Technology, 10000 shares outstanding
Before the mid-2006 shareholders meeting:
45%: Taylor Senior (inactive) 15%: Clarance Taylor (inactive) 20%: Constance Taylor (5 held for Kimberly Taylor) 8%: Daniel Thompson 10%: Others (aggregate)
After the mid-2006 shareholders meeting:
45%: Taylor Senior (inactive) 15%: Constance Taylor 18%: Daniel Thompson 5%: Brisbane Adams 5%: Kimberly Taylor 10%: Others (aggregate)
Sometimes I come up with an puzzle idea that is so silly that there's no point in saving it for something better. So, here's a free puzzle for you.
Each one of these defines a word or phrase. All the answers have some property in common. Since some of the definitions are ambiguous, you'll probably need to find that property to know exactly what phrases I'm referring to.
Wereseals
Cooked soybeans
Composer of The Four Seasons
A company that used to have a logo that included six ducks
Scientific name for the freshwater dogfish
It comes between "revelation" and "riven"
One of two U. S. States whose state flag looks the same when turned upside-down
A 1960's animated series about an inept secret agent, created by the same man who invented Batman
A bike with a motor, such as the one depicted in this picture
Rape, necrophilia, and zoophilia, perhaps
Czech translation of "Wenceslaus"
Surname of the creator of the first comic book printed by Image Comics
The westernmost city in the Peloponnese
A "nickname" for Jesus Christ
The size of a ship that is just large enough to travel from Sri Lanka to Taiwan without needing to go south of Malaysia
Where you might find the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
If you think you've solved it, try adding to the list instead of giving it away.
One change I made this year is that in the past, my "sort by ranking" was based on the average of the three scores I gave to the game -- that's been replaced this year by "sort by popularity", where popularity is defined by what order the games were depleted from the lottery at the end of the event.
This seemed to be the year where abstract games dominated and party games almost disappeared, along with the more story-oriented strategy games (seeing no submissions from Rio Grande Games nor Uberplay this year, for example). Overall, the average quality of games seemed to go down; I gave out only one "fun factor" rating of 9, and everything else was lower.
Nobody does theme like Snout. Seriously. Most Games (including all the ones we've run) have a theme sort of pasted on top, in flavor text and iconography and the occasional "cut scene". Snout games, particularly recent ones, are really schooling us all in how a theme can actually weave into the experience of a game. There were several times during this game which really *felt* like the movie. If only we had been able to destroy more expensive props...
So that was awesome. I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say we'll really miss you guys.
My quibbles mostly have to do with the "arbitrary" feel of some of the puzzles (which is a philosophical thing, I think, see my notes about the X=3 puzzle), the use of "off the shelf" puzzles in some places (not actually a big deal) and the fact that teams would often get bunched up and released all at once (making earlier gains and losses feel moot -- see the Pinball City notes).
Kick-off: Midnight Madness trivia contest
I appreciate why this was done: it's a group activity, highly thematic, fun to watch, and creates some initial spread. I didn't really like the way it worked out, though. Psychologically, at the start of the game, we're all really, really excited to get started, and having to wait for other people to have their names drawn, come up, and answer a question mostly just causes anxiety. The random-draw aspect also feels gratuitously unfair -- of course those extra 15 minutes probably won't matter in the end, but right at the start it felt like a really big deal. I really prefer the good old "tear open the envelope on the mark" kickoff.
First puzzle: Simple cryptic-ish wordplay, hex calculator numbers
We got "shoreline" and "vista" right away, and because we're Googlers we knew what it was talking about. We didn't figure out the hex thing until we were most of the way there. Familiarity with the area is a perfectly fair thing to use when solving, but familiarity with the Google environment felt a little dirty for some reason. Maybe it's just that the community has a lot of Google and a lot of Stanford, and things that depend on knowing things about one of those campuses feel sort of unfair. Compare this with the Cardinal Coffee clue, below.
Anyway, the clue itself was fine. It fit nicely with the first clue from the movie. The calculator thing was a little "geekier" than I expected for some reason but I think that's just me.
Vista slope: X=3
There aren't enough survey-distant-objects puzzles in Games, so I was happy to see this. It was also nice when preparation comes in handy, and Corey's nice image-stabilized binoculars were great for the Crittenden text (which was barely legible with the binoculars GC was handing out). So that was cool. And, of course, it was a great reference to the movie.
But I was otherwise frustrated with this clue. It seemed obvious that there were three sets of equations, and we (along with every other team) spent a great deal of time carefully surveying the scene for it. Apparently it was simply not visible from the top of the hill. This feels deeply wrong for some reason (and I don't think it's just me): putting the mailbox at the summit really makes it seem like the puzzle ought to be solved by looking around from there.
The tubes were a nice touch, and a good way to handle oncoming darkness, but it was sad that we all ended up having to use them. The tubes also taught us that several items of apparent information (the order of the lines in each sign, the position of the girls with respect to the equations, the placement of parentheses) weren't important, because they differed in the tube version. That was dissatisfying.
But above all, it felt weird and really, really arbitrary to just set X=3 and add up all the equations. We actually went through several "maybe X really is just one fixed value" possibilities, but since many of the equations ended up negative, we discarded it. Why add them up? Why not multiply them, or concatenate them, or combine them in lots of other plausible ways? I think this puzzle very directly points at the major difference between Snout's puzzle design philosophy and ours: the Snout school holds that searching a space of equally plausible mechanisms for extracting an answer is fair game; we hold that in an elegant puzzle, there should really only be one reasonable way to get an answer (if you're smart enough to recognize what it is).
We went through many, many alternatives, including digit pangrams for X, Diophantine equations, and all kinds of things, many of which yielded decent partial answers (but of course no final answer), many of which seem like they would have been better puzzles than what we got.
Acorn's house: Piano music
This was a good music clue. It would have really sucked to not have musical talent on the team... but fortunately, we did. (I wonder what the experience was like for a team that took GC up on their offer to play for them.) The mechanism was clean. It took us a while to recognize the final jingle, but once we made sure to borrow the timing of the sour notes (not just their pitch), it came out quickly in a great "ahhhh" moment. Also, of course, the whole thing was nicely thematic.
We had fun acting out a scene from the movie, and other teams reported enjoying their creative challenges. This is notable because we're usually grumpy about creative challenges. A skit or scene enactment is IMHO a lot nicer than being asked to write a poem or something, because you can just do it without feeling like you're struggling not to obsess over iambic pentameter.
Hopefully the videos will show up somewhere.
Tied House brewery (or rather, the Old Spaghetti Factory next door): Nonagram rebus
Something was seriously wrong with the placement of this clue. Stuff happens, of course, but it would have been nice to get more help from GC sooner. This was one of several places where, for one reason or another, several teams ended up bunched up and then released all at once (in this case, once GC finally told some team where to find the clue).
I was actually expecting a lot more "easter egg hunt" clue sites, since the movie tended to have that. I sort of dread those, and our team had spent some time discussing how to do better on them. This was really the only one, though, and it was broken, so much for that.
The nonagrams were very "stock", we all expected there to be some twist but there wasn't; that was sort of strange. The scrambled rebus was pretty much straight out of the movie, which was cool. We actually mentioned the word "cardinal" several times, but since none of us had ever heard of Cardinal Coffee, and there are lots of Cardinal businesses, it didn't help us. Also, the "coffee" really looked a lot like tea, in a cup with a rounded bottom. I looked at it several times and said to myself "yes, someone definitely drew this picture specifically to say *tea*, not 'cup' or 'coffee' or 'drink' or 'hot'...". A simple square bottom would have helped a lot.
I imagine a team which was familiar with Cardinal Coffee (a major local landmark, I guess -- one of us had actually been there, though he hadn't remembered the name) could have an experience much like we did with Vista Slope. That's fair.
Cardinal Coffee: Breast-euphemism word search
We found the word search right away in the Metro. Not sure how other teams fared with finding the "waitress" plant (I was a little sorry later to find out we missed that -- but not too sad since it gave us a time advantage).
Giggling over the euphemisms was fun. Otherwise, it was just a vanilla cross-off-the-words-and-read-the-message, right down to "you should probably start at the end, to get the actual answer and skip the long intro filler text".
Purple Moose: Words in the convertible
Driving around with the hilarious couple was super fun. It was one of the least thematic clues (there is a connection, but it's tenuous), but that's okay, the actors more than made up for it in sheer brilliance.
The actual solving was another instance of arbitrariness, though not too bad really. We needed a nudge from GC ("look for the patterns between the words"), but given that we started looking at shared letters and eventually found the answer. What really threw us for a loop here were the pointed references to Scrabble in the patter (not just the word "scrabble", but commentary about how "rattlesnake" was placed on two triple word scores and scored 800 points and so on), which seemed like it very directly indicated a solution where the words would be placed on a Scrabble board, or at least have their point values computed. That really seemed like a gratuitous red herring.
Golfland: "Fore-" words
Normally I would think it was unfair to hose a team that didn't play through the course. In this case, given the movie, I think it's totally fine.
We collected the data from the cards, and after getting stuck for a little while some people went out to roll the balls through all the "interactive" holes, and they discovered the message. Other teams who actually played the course weren't so lucky -- they thought the audio recordings were just a normal part of the course, and disregarded them. Adding some sort of "Leon says" flavor there might have helped, but eh, we've made worse mistakes. :) Also, other teams can't help but notice the activity around the air hockey tables, so you won't be hosed forever unless you leave the site or something.
With all the data in hand, the puzzle was pretty straightforward. I really do like how it simulated the experience of the movie, where rushing through and skipping the experience makes you miss the vital information. I wonder if any team actually played an honest round of mini golf. Oh, and it was cool to be at a place that was warm and had tables and served snacks and had bathrooms and stuff.
Diridon Station: Radio music clue
Fortunately we called GC when we got there and were told to check out the Obama sign, otherwise I doubt we would have found the clue. Having struggled with setting up a mini radio station ourselves for a clue, I appreciate that the radio broadcaster worked quite well, and the channels were well separated! Kudos to the technical team.
The actual clue was a bit frustrating because the announcement text seemed to be specifically saying that the band name was *not* important. Only after we called GC and had that impression corrected did we go back to look. It really didn't help that some of the pieces were from musicals or TV theme songs, which don't really have an obvious "artist" (the composer? the performer? the name of the musical/show?), which seemed like it was confirming "artist doesn't matter". And the actual solution seemed to rely on a sort of loosely defined overlap of phonetics between the artist on one side and the title on another, with no particular ordering? Maybe there was a deeper pattern we missed that made it all clean and tidy.
VTA station: Hare Krisha typo text
I guess not too many teams actually had to solve this puzzle. It was... kind of tedious. The initial "aha" where you realize there are different versions is kind of neat, and the final "aha" where you recognize the picture is definitely neat, but in between it's an English teacher's nightmare. After a while, in the middle of the night, your eyes just slide right over the typos...
Greyhound terminal: Lolcatz
I really like the idea of a lolcatz puzzle, and I really like the idea of the "corrections", as if some enraged English teacher (continuing the theme) had come upon a lolcat archive and gone mad. Also, the actual images brought a nice dose of levity, always welcome during the wee hours. A word chain is also a nice thing to be doing in the wee hours, you can plug away identifying phrases and lining things up without having to exercise those strategic-planning brain segments that would really rather just doze off.
The actual correction mechanic, with the crossed-out insert/delete signs, was a little strange and arbitrary. I actually slept through much of the puzzle, so I wasn't sure how much trouble this really gave us.
"Pinball City" (Calderon Ave, Mountain View): Star Fire video game
We never did recognize the Q*bert sound, and needed a hint for that. When we did enter the correct initials (and another team did so around the same time), pretty much all the teams there got the answer. This was another place (and quite late in the game) where a "bunching" effect occurred, which felt like it sort of defeated any earlier progress differences. (It was especially weird because many teams had been skipped over the typo clue.)
The directions to "watch your score" were a little strange; many of us spent quite a while poring over the score while shooting blue enemies (which are always worth the same amount). Eventually we thought maybe it was an oblique way of referring to the musical *score* of the game, but technically sound effects aren't the score, and anyway that's super oblique and seems like an unnecessary red herring.
It also seemed weird for the whole puzzle to hinge on the ability to recognize these specific video game sounds, with no escape hatch at all if you can't.
Stanford Memorial Auditorium: Hissy Fit
This was really, really, really great. Every team that saw this clue had funny stories.
Stanford Oval: Don't Get Hammered
We tend to have a "hate-hate" relationship with physical challenge puzzles... but we all quite enjoyed this one. The deflation of the balls was sort of unfortunate but in some ways made things easier to deal with. Everyone seemed like they had a good time, and it was a good way to let off some steam after a lot of hours in the van.
It seemed like maybe there should have been one or two fewer hammers on the field, though. Other players were brutal with hammers at first -- it was hard to even get a peek at "popular" balls. Once GC took over the hammers, things seemed a lot more fair; you got some chance to look at things, but you had to keep moving and work for it.
The actual puzzle was sort of a slog with all that data, it was an exercise in careful note-taking, which is challenging to do in the run-around sweaty environment of the game, but that's all part of the clue. Still, I think making it 2/3 the size might have improved matters. It's really hard to test out this kind of thing, though, and GC did a great job of adapting.
This is in regards to the Pain Before Pleasure mystery in the 1991 arcade game Total Carnage. You'll probably want to read that page for some background.
In any case, my thoughts are that if there is a secret ending, it's almost guaranteed that the text is going to be stored in the same place as the other endings. So I went searching in the ROM for the text. Guess what, it's surprisingly hard. The reason is because the text is interlaced in two different ROMs!
In the ROM tcu89.bin, at offset 0xA431, one can find the ASCII string "ogauain!". This seems to be gibberish until you look at exactly the same offset in the ROM tcu105.bin, where you can see the string "Cnrtltos".
Interlace the two and you get the message "Congratulations!" Using this, one can reconstruct the entire section of text as follows. The line breaks are actually ASCII 0 (NULL) in the ROM:
Congratulations!
You have joined the heroes from Smash T.V. in the Pleasure Domes! We have been waiting for you! The ladies have been most anxious!
You have delivered Captain Carnage and Major Mayhem into a life of leisure. Their every wish will be granted. Of course, they will have to share the goodies with the Smash boys, but there is plenty to go around!
You are one of only a few who have reached this far.
You are a great dual joystick game player.
However, as greedy as you are, you failed to pick up all the cash and prizes sitting in the Pleasure Dome!
If you do this, the ladies will prove that pain before pleasure is worth it.
Can you do this?
Thank you for playing Total Carnage.
Total Carnage Design Team: Mark Turmell John Tobias Shawn Liptak Jim Gentile Jon Hey Eugene Jarvis Tony Goskie
Special Thanks: George Petro Larry Demar Ed Boon (Voices) Todd Allen Cary Mednick Sheridan Oursler Mark Loffredo Ray Gay Ray Czajka Betty Purcell
Congratulations!
You have destroyed Akhboob's army and his ability to create more mutant life forms. You wrecked his Bio-Nuclear facility, airport, communications system, weapons arsenal, and his military vehicles.
You also saved hundreds of hostages and recovered billions of dollars worth of stolen gems. That is great news!
However, you allowed General Akhboob to escape!
Being the DUFUS you are, you *also failed to collect the 220 **also failed to collect the 200 keys required to join other game heroes in the Midway Pleasure Domes. This is not good.
Ahkboob lives...
No pleasure for you today...
Thank you for playing!
Congratulations!
You fried the hell out of that jerk! Great job!
You have destroyed Akhboob's army and his ability to create more mutant life forms. You blew up his Bio-Nuclear facility, airport, communications, and weapons arsenal. You saved hundreds of lives! You are a stud game player.
However, the real goal of this game is to join the heroes from Smash T.V. in the Midway Pleasure Domes. *You must collect 220 keys **You must collect 200 keys to gain entrance. You failed to do this.
You suck.
Thank you for playing!
There are a few non-ASCII characters in there, which I've used asterisks to represent. * is 0x80, and ** is 0x81. It's clearly a branch point.
The word "Congratulations" (interlaced), appears nowhere else in the ROMs.
Now, is this incontrovertible evidence that there is no special "pain before pleasure" ending? Not at all. It's certainly conceivable that the programmers decided to use a special encoding that they used only for the hidden ending, and whatever strings are shown are stored in some obscure location in the ROMs. However, I strongly doubt it; at this point it just seems more likely that this was a practical joke on the part of the programmers, especially as seeing nobody has ever achieved this in the last 15 years.
(1) In this year's Democratic primary, the three front-runners are all U.S. Senators. None of the front-runners have ever held any high-level executive position -- by which I mean State Governor, Vice President, or President.
Before this election, when was the last time this happened?
(2) If you look at all the jobs that each of our prior 42 presidents held prior to becoming President, you'll see a lot of public service jobs, unsurprisingly. In a few cases, you'll see some private job (e.g., Lincoln was a lawyer before running for President) but go back a bit further and you'll see a public service job (Lincoln was a Representative from Illinois before going into private practice). Match the numbers with the jobs:
14 of them were ___. 10 of them were ___. 5 of them were ___. 5 of them were ___. 4 of them were ___. 2 of them were ___. 2 of them were ___.
A friend of mine used the phrase מימין עד שמאל in an e-mail.
Since I don't understand Hebrew, my first instinct was to copy-and-paste it into a Google search box; maybe someone has used the phrase before.
Well, a whole bunch of Hebrew results, but clearly the words in the phrase were being broken up; the search results were matching שמאל, and מימין, and עד, but not together as a phrase. Sure, that happens in search results all the time, so the solution is just to put it in quotes.
Then I discovered that adding quotes around text that goes מימין עד שמאל is surprisingly hard; I try adding a quote on the מימין, and it ends up on the שמאל, and vice-versa.
I have these Taiwan-manufactured DVDs of Babylon 5, as I've mentioned in a previous post. Today I had the idea -- if I'm finding these bad translations into Chinese so funny, how about I just translate them back into English and share the fun?
Fortunately, with modern technology, it just takes a little bit of work to rip the DVD, add custom subtitles, and upload to YouTube. My timing is a bit off, though.
I swear that the English on the video is as close as possible to what the Chinese subtitles say. A Chinese viewer who is viewing the subtitles will pretty much see what you see...
The hunt was pretty fun, but definitely was not something that played to our strengths, namely the ability to solve sophisticated puzzles. Every puzzle in the hunt was something that could be solved in under 5 minutes, so the fact that we might solve a puzzle twice as fast did not lead to much of a time advantage -- any time advantage on a puzzle could easily be canceled out by a "DON'T WALK" sign, a late train, a sub-optimal route to the next location. In fact, any time advantage on a puzzle was definitely canceled out by an out-of-shape, 200-pound puzzle solver being unable to run in the rain (waves).
So, overall, although it would be nice to win one of the top two spots and go to New York, I'm certainly not the best one to represent the Bay Area in this matter.
In most games, with a reasonable amount of certainty (but not even 100%), you can say that all players are trying to win. In the case that a player isn't trying to win, players will have a secondary goal, but what that secondary goal is very uncertain and unless you know the player well, it cannot be predicted. Possibilities are:
* Trying to place as high as possible (2nd place >> 3rd place); * Trying to attain highest possible score; * Trying to maximize highest expected value of score; * Trying to maximize difference between score and mean score; * Trying to make the other players as close as possible; * Trying to play as fast as possible; * Trying to end the game as fast as possible; * Trying to prolong the game as long as possible; * Trying to make the rest of the game as simple as possible; * Trying to make the rest of the game as chaotic as possible; * Trying to make moves that are least likely to affect the current rankings; * Trying to make moves that are most likely to affect the current rankings; * Trying to make the winner be the player who has a worse winning record; * Trying to make the most pleasing personal layout; * Getting a specific cool-looking card in play; * Getting "revenge" on the player that you think put you out of contention for winning; * Trying to maximize the fun that other players are having; * Trying to minimize the fun that other players are having; * Trying to play as random as possible; * Adopting a strategy from above, while making that fact dead obvious to all the other players; * Adopting a strategy from above while hiding it from all the other players; * Adopting a strategy from above while hiding it from all the other players, but surreptitiously dropping clues in some passive-aggressive manner that you might be playing that strategy.
I've seen all of these in games, in combination sometimes.
Fly me to the moon,
and let me play among the stars,
Let me see what spring is like onexcept that since the actual stars aren't in the solar system, I think I actually mean the asteroids, which are between Jupiter and Mars.
When you wish upon a star,
makes no difference who you are:
Anything your heart desiresConsidering that the nearest star other than the sun is four lightyears away, it will take at least eight years before the response will come to you.
Somewhere over the rainbow,
way up high,
There's a song that I heard ofYou should be able to look down with the sun behind you and see the entire circle of the rainbow, but you won't ever hear this fact mentioned even once in a lullaby.
(apologies to Ned Washington, Yip Harburg, and Bart Howard)
So I'm leaving the office a bit later tonight than usual (3:30am), and I decide to stop by the snack kitchen to see if there's anything left.
One of the things supplied to the kitchen every morning at 8am are these little grab-and-go packs of sushi. A pack contains one nigiri and three makizushi. They're thrown out the next morning when the resupply comes (one probably doesn't want to keep raw fish more than a day old anyway). The quantity is counted pretty well (surprisingly good considering I'm pretty sure they don't monitor the supply very closely); usually about 40 or so boxes come in the morning, and there's usually around 3 boxes left at night, and it's almost always the vegetarian sushi that isn't as popular. It's quite convenient if I want to work through lunch; just grab a pack and eat at the desk.
Tonight, though, was a little bit different. There were something like 15 boxes left, only 6 of them vegetarian. I'm not sure why, but maybe everyone filled up on Halloween candy or something. Also, a lot of people in the office were out at Campfire One around dinner-time, so maybe that had something to do with it too.
Not a single employee was in the whole building. I could tell because it was dark, and the lights go on if there's any sort of movement.
So, I had an idea. I opened a box of sushi, and just ate the meat. The slice of raw tuna off the nigiri, and the innards of the makizushi (unagi, spicy tuna, bits of avocado). Then I did the same for another box. Then another. I went through about 11 boxes, leaving behind 4 boxes of vegetarian, which will presumably get thrown out four more hours from now -- as well as a really freaking large chunk of white rice, discolored in motley spots. Which I threw in the trash.
All the while doing this, I was feeling kinda weird. It was if my moral sense was telling me I should feel guilty, but was unable to come up with a compelling argument. The "waste" angle doesn't work; the food was going to get thrown out anyway (there's a rumor that we donate excess food to a food bank, but day-old sushi?). The "health" angle doesn't gain much traction either; raw fish is one of the healthiest meats one can eat. I probably also did my health a favor by not eating all that white rice -- brown rice gives a healthy supply of fiber, but white rice is almost just pure calories. I suppose I did look very unmannerly extracting the meat from each sushi, but is it that bad to ignore manners when no one else is around?
I guess overall it's probably some form of collective guilt, as what I was doing would have been clearly impossible without the lavish excesses of my status group, whatever that group is -- workers at my company? First-world country denizens? Shrug.
Eating the equivalent of 25 pieces of sashimi at one sitting though? Yum. Who cares if they were each 20 hours old?
Two Puzzles (Not) from the Philly Sudoku Championship
[Oct. 25th, 2007|10:23 am]
Amid some of the writeups of the Sudoku Championship, I thought it might be interesting to share a couple of puzzles you didn't quite see at the championship:
This puzzle was my attempt to push the envelope just a little bit at what can be done with theming Sudoku puzzles. There's a small intuitive leap to figure out what to do with the letters, presumably why it was rejected. After you get the leap, the puzzle isn't too hard; it would be about a medium.
This was my first draft of the Q puzzle, which Thomas mentions in glow(er)ing words on his journal entry. I really like the symmetries in this first draft; as you can see, not only are the placements near-symmetric, but many of the actual digit selections are symmetric as well. This puzzle was something like the last one I composed, and there are two bits of non-sledgehammer logic that you need to make progress.
After that placement, you can use a lot of standard (sledgehammer) logic to get a grid that is about half-filled (specifically, 43 cells filled). At that point:
The version that actually made it to the competition had two more givens, which means that the second bit of logic isn't needed.
I guess this will be the fourth game in the series, following Street Fighter, Street Fighter II, Street Fighter II Champion Edition, Street Fighter II Turbo Hyper Fighting, Super Street Fighter II, Street Fighter The Movie, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Hyper Street Fighter II, Street Fighter Alpha, Street Fighter Alpha 2, Street Fighter Zero 2 Alpha, Street Fighter Alpha 3, Street Fighter EX, Street Fighter EX Plus, Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha, Street Fighter EX2, Street Fighter EX2 Plus, Street Fighter EX3, Street Fighter III, Street Fighter III 2nd Impact, and Street Fighter III 3rd Strike.
The puzzles will be selected by Nick Baxter, who is captain of the U.S. team for the World Sudoku Championship. We can't reveal how the puzzles are being created for the tournament.
I'm going to answer that question here to say that I created the puzzles for the tournament, but with a good bit of testing, comments, and back-and-forth with Nick Baxter. I feel pretty excited; I feel like I've come up with a pretty good set of puzzles, many of which are themed with the tournament.
Now, whether anyone will appreciate them is another matter...
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