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Wheel of Fortune Statitstics
Pat Sajak (after a contestant won all 3 tossups): You know, some people just have a knack for tossups. That happens more than you'd think ( Read more... ) -
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The Republicans are complaining that Obama has spent the last week working out trade agreements with President Hu Jiantao of China. The result of this seems to be $45 billion worth of new contracts for American companies, and increased protection of intellectual property so that our companies can compete more effectively in China in general. What ( Read more... ) -
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I have a solution to the last problem from my last post: What is E(max(d4!, d6!))? The technique is generalizable, but I have yet to reduce it to a closed form solution.
The problem that I ran into solving this problem is that using a simple 4x6 table (as I used a 6x6 table to solve the E(max(d6!,d6!)) problem) with a recursive step in the bottom ( Read more... ) -
Savage Worlds Math Puzzle
Savage Worlds is a role playing system. My RPG group started playing an adventure in it last night. We had a lot of fun, and the game has an interesting dice mechanic which features the ominous sounding "exploding dice" (for me, this was part of the fun).
Each character has several attributes (Strength, Faith, etc... think ability scores in D&D ( Read more... ) -
One more FRACTRAN post
Here's a program to calculate factorials ( Read more... ) -
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Here's a FRACTRAN program to compute Fibonacci numbers. Input is 2^n, output is 3^fib(n)
13/11 133/85 17/19 23/17 1015/69 23/29 31/23 111/217 31/37 13/31 17/26 33/2 1/13 1/5
And one that sums up the first n integers (input: 2^n , output: 3^(1+2+3+...+n)):
165/14 7/11 13/7 17/65 38/85 17/19 1/17 105/2
And one that squares a number (2^n -> 3^(n^2))
2415/ ( Read more... ) -
FRACTRAN
This is simultaneously the most useless and the coolest thing I've learned in (at least) the last year.
FRACTRAN is a ridiculously esoteric programming language. But it's Turring complete. It's almost impossible to write anything but the simplest programs in it, but theoretically, you can write a program to compute any quantity that you could ( Read more... ) -
A serious suggestion for soccer (er futbol)
Move the penalty kicks to the beginning of the game. Every game of soccer should start with penalty kicks. Use the same format that they currently use to break ties at the beginning of the game (ie each team gets 5, then if still tied, go to sudden death kicks), just do them at the beginning of the game instead of the end. Then, award the team ( Read more... )
