push.cx
Peter Bhat Harkins
Legacy Bitmask Puzzle
Code: legacy, math, puzzle, SQL
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My friend David had a puzzle in his legacy app. There’s a bitmask called ErrorCode. The table ErrorCodes lists the meaning of each bit:
Yomi vs. Nash Equilibria
Games: David Sirlin, game design, math, yomi
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I was rereading David Sirlin’s World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things as part of a conversation with a friend and I got to pondering his concept of yomi. I’ve previously mentioned it as having an influence on my game designs, so I’ll just quote his short definition:
Think Outside the Euclidean Universe
Life: graphics, humor, math, work
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You’ve probably all seen the brain-teaser that’s a perennial favorite with uncreative managers the world over. (Why an exercise in creative thinking is really only loved by incredibly boring people is a discussion beyond the scope of this blog post.) The brain-teaser goes like this:
Versioning: The Next Big Thing
Code: databases, Django, math, web
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In the web development world, anyways. So, in the grand scheme of things, maybe not a huge deal to anyone else. Versioning is going to be one of the biggest problems and opportunities there is in web development, and it’s going to take us at least five years to get it right.
Compressing Sudoku
Games: math
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At least a few times a week I see someone playing Sudoku while commuting on the L, and it’s always annoyed me. The problem is that Sudoku is a small 9×9 grid with 10-20 numbers on it, and a book is a chunk of dead tree. How inefficient! There’s a tiny amount of very compressable data in a large, uncompressable phsyical object. I can’t do anything about the book, but I could imagine one with a grid on the back, a dry-erase marker in the spine, and two dozen puzzles per page in some kind of notation. I’m not going to start publishing specialty books, but I’d like to know what that notation will be.