This one is nice :) (but not that hard to solve)
Capital letters to move. (International Chess)
........
...B.pK.
........
q.......
.n..k...
........
P...P..P
.N......
Capital letters move up (yay this makes sense on a screen). Try not to think too much. This isn't a hard puzzle.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Substring Quiz
Find words with the following substrings: (eg aeiou ---> Aerious, Absteinous, Abstemious, Abstenious, Abstentious, Abstentiously, Aceriflorum, Aceriflorus, Acheilous, Acheirous, Acleistous, Adecticous, Adventious, Affectious, Aleikoum, Alpestrious, Anemious, Annelidous, Arsenious, Arteriosum, Arteriosus, Arterious, Avenious, Bacterious, Caesious, Camelious, Carnelious, Facetious, Fracedinous, Gareisoun, Gravedinous, Haeriously, Majestious, Materious, Parecious, Phragelliorynchus, Placentious or Tragedious or sacrilegious )
1) e-i-e-i-o
2) i-i-i-u
Meh...
1) e-i-e-i-o
2) i-i-i-u
Meh...
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Post Vocab-Mugging Session 3
This post is dedicated to Chops.
The bough of this tree is so huge that I can sit on it.
I am whetting my knife on this stone, so that I can make it so sharp that it can pierce through stone.
The dearth of misers has led to a bountiful increase in donations.
Having spent insufferable hours trapped in the traffic jam, being able to speed down the expressway is only a wistful longing.
His florid prose is complemented by the brevity of his writing.
The opacity of quantum cryptography makes it an esoteric subject that only makes sense to a small group of people.
How can you play such a banal variation in one of the most explosive and unexplored openings?
Watching others bungee jump gives me a vicarious thrill.
This law, implemented in 2011, is put into effect in 2010. Now that's retroactive.
Please stop making equivocal statements and state your point clearly.
Those boisterous boys are so obstreperous! Even the threat of grounding them cannot stop them.
Diffident people are usually very ingenuous, and this may be a stereotype.
People who are sanctimonious usually become very cantankerous when their moral capability has been impugned.
I shall contrive to clear this quagmire of problems and make a morally-edifying film to clear the world of vulgarities (*hint hint* BARR).
How can a highly esteemed scholar make some vapid statements?
Despite living through the horrors of the Holocaust, he spoke about the Germans without a hint of rancour.
He repudiated all offers to write a book about his philosophy because he felt that BARR's book on BARR"s philosophy repudiated his philosophy.
He is a doughty fellow, and managed to single-handedly stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the world.
Years of indoctrination has ossified their mindsets, make them unwilling to change their minds.
The surreptitious salvo of bullets killed everyone in the courtroom.
She is a demure teacher and accepts no nonsense from her students.
Barr is angry because he received laudatory comments vitiated with stinging sarcasm.
Barr shot him an incredulous look, unable to believe that someone does not know what a kernel is (I wonder who is that someone XD).
His sermons are full of puns and conceits (whatever this means).
The warm rays of the sun was soon supplanted by frigid snow.
Aftering ousting Gennady Korotevich and becoming IOI champ, Penguin is inundated with requests for autographs.
We are concordant that we should pepper our daily speeches with more sophisticated vocabulary, like concordant (Ok lah, maybe not that cheem for some people).
The vignette of this treatise between China and US shows that this document puts down the rudimentary framework of the New World Order.
When sheep are allowed to frolic in gargantuan fields, they are virtually intractable.
A thin veneer of politeness hid BARR's growing anger.
The shopping list needs to be winnowed to a single page, so that carrying the items back will not be too encumbersome a task.
Misers are parsimony.
I feel august in August, because August is such an august month.
This obnoxious BARR likes to embellish his sentences with vulgarities.
This TV channel is so partisan; they only support the Republicans.
The decorous behaviour of a BARR is to pull a smug face everywhere he goes.
This avant-garde play is so modern and shocking! In other words, its so BARR!
Legends says that anyone cursed by this malediction will commit a lot of malapropism if he or she walks onto a prairie.
BARRs have the propensity to talk about byzantine topics such as mergeable heaps and AVL trees when they get bored.
Although this MacDonald's burger has been left on the shelf for eons, it still appears unsullied.
His venal ways are finally revealed, and his contract has been annulled.
Voracious people are usually supercilious because they believe that they can hold more in their stomach.
Although he is down with cancer, he is still remarkably spry.
This controversial book elicited a gamut of responses from the readers.
Fusion trees do not make BARRs fazed; on the other hand, BARRs make confusing fusion trees.
Flouting school rules fills him with mirth.
Your radical political views are repugnant to me.
The venerable BARR receives adulation from everyone (although, unlike adulation, he deserves it).
He is such a pedantic person that he makes changes to every single minutiae grammar mistake.
Although this charlatan claims to know the answer to the universe, he only knows how to shout "42!!!".
This vociferous debater likes to make known his opinions in an irate manner.
These proverbs are used so often that they have now become inane platitudes.
This porous surface allows water to flow through.
This erudite man is irascible, so you need to hold your temper if you want to learn anything from him.
He is such a capricious person that you do not need to write a polemical piece of work to convince him that your views are correct.
Drug traffickers have used this country as a conduit for shipments to the US.
People with too much hubris usually use a lot of vituperation on people who dare contradict them.
This whimsical play, although funny, transgress our notions of morality.
Qiang people are know in common parlance as "ImBARR people".
Although this job requires you to be peripepatic, it is a remunerative job.
Her vivacious personality makes her very likeable.
This problem seems to have many solutions. I vacillated between DP and comp-geom, and spent so much time deciding between the two that I have no time left to complete my code.
This garrulous person can rhapsodise about anything for 42 years without stopping.
There are many recent reports of milk adulterated with melamine.
It is useless to continually hark back to the past.
He revelled in his new found fame.
As he is a stoic person, he can only show his emotions though his anthology of poems and short stories.
The Yellow River meanders across China, making a totaly of 97 turns (if I did not remember wrongly).
Cows like to meander over the grasslands and slowly nibble the grass.
This verbatim account of our interview is only possible due to the invention of the tape recorder.
Peasants live in squalors.
This bigot has a mellifluous voice, which he uses to manipulate others to believe in his point of view.
The schism of this huge Caucus has immense implications on the world.
Even though I am extremely busy now, I can vouchsafe a reply to your question about whether Israel will vouchsafe the Palestinians' return to their homeland.
Mutations have caused his legs to atrophy.
His didactic stories are very prosaic and make me want to sleep.
Spamming your sentences with grandiloquent words will result in circumlocutory replies that beat around the bush and are not direct and to the point.
Einstein believes in the mutability of space and time.
I spoke to my interlocutor in a coarse manner.
He is a philistine and cannot appreciate art or music, as he only knows how to mug.
Your should cut your straggly hair.
The AVL tree became emblematic of imBARRness.
The Harry Potter Series is a progeny of a train ride.
These bastions act as an bulwark against frontal attacks.
Fashion is ephemeral and evanescent, and changes every summer.
This despotic ruler is killed by the rebels.
He is always an amenable child, and listens to his parent's admonishments without a single objection.
Stop being so fickle; instead of changing your mind every second, set your heart down to doing something!
Even though BARR is, well, a BARR, people lionise him.
Bush was vilified in the press for starting the Iraq War.
He is a pious man, but he makes pious speeches, so do not harbour any pious hopes that he is sincere.
Uncle BARR gave an avuncular pat on BARR's shoulder.
This person is a pugnacious person who loves to fight with others.
The bough of this tree is so huge that I can sit on it.
I am whetting my knife on this stone, so that I can make it so sharp that it can pierce through stone.
The dearth of misers has led to a bountiful increase in donations.
Having spent insufferable hours trapped in the traffic jam, being able to speed down the expressway is only a wistful longing.
His florid prose is complemented by the brevity of his writing.
The opacity of quantum cryptography makes it an esoteric subject that only makes sense to a small group of people.
How can you play such a banal variation in one of the most explosive and unexplored openings?
Watching others bungee jump gives me a vicarious thrill.
This law, implemented in 2011, is put into effect in 2010. Now that's retroactive.
Please stop making equivocal statements and state your point clearly.
Those boisterous boys are so obstreperous! Even the threat of grounding them cannot stop them.
Diffident people are usually very ingenuous, and this may be a stereotype.
People who are sanctimonious usually become very cantankerous when their moral capability has been impugned.
I shall contrive to clear this quagmire of problems and make a morally-edifying film to clear the world of vulgarities (*hint hint* BARR).
How can a highly esteemed scholar make some vapid statements?
Despite living through the horrors of the Holocaust, he spoke about the Germans without a hint of rancour.
He repudiated all offers to write a book about his philosophy because he felt that BARR's book on BARR"s philosophy repudiated his philosophy.
He is a doughty fellow, and managed to single-handedly stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the world.
Years of indoctrination has ossified their mindsets, make them unwilling to change their minds.
The surreptitious salvo of bullets killed everyone in the courtroom.
She is a demure teacher and accepts no nonsense from her students.
Barr is angry because he received laudatory comments vitiated with stinging sarcasm.
Barr shot him an incredulous look, unable to believe that someone does not know what a kernel is (I wonder who is that someone XD).
His sermons are full of puns and conceits (whatever this means).
The warm rays of the sun was soon supplanted by frigid snow.
Aftering ousting Gennady Korotevich and becoming IOI champ, Penguin is inundated with requests for autographs.
We are concordant that we should pepper our daily speeches with more sophisticated vocabulary, like concordant (Ok lah, maybe not that cheem for some people).
The vignette of this treatise between China and US shows that this document puts down the rudimentary framework of the New World Order.
When sheep are allowed to frolic in gargantuan fields, they are virtually intractable.
A thin veneer of politeness hid BARR's growing anger.
The shopping list needs to be winnowed to a single page, so that carrying the items back will not be too encumbersome a task.
Misers are parsimony.
I feel august in August, because August is such an august month.
This obnoxious BARR likes to embellish his sentences with vulgarities.
This TV channel is so partisan; they only support the Republicans.
The decorous behaviour of a BARR is to pull a smug face everywhere he goes.
This avant-garde play is so modern and shocking! In other words, its so BARR!
Legends says that anyone cursed by this malediction will commit a lot of malapropism if he or she walks onto a prairie.
BARRs have the propensity to talk about byzantine topics such as mergeable heaps and AVL trees when they get bored.
Although this MacDonald's burger has been left on the shelf for eons, it still appears unsullied.
His venal ways are finally revealed, and his contract has been annulled.
Voracious people are usually supercilious because they believe that they can hold more in their stomach.
Although he is down with cancer, he is still remarkably spry.
This controversial book elicited a gamut of responses from the readers.
Fusion trees do not make BARRs fazed; on the other hand, BARRs make confusing fusion trees.
Flouting school rules fills him with mirth.
Your radical political views are repugnant to me.
The venerable BARR receives adulation from everyone (although, unlike adulation, he deserves it).
He is such a pedantic person that he makes changes to every single minutiae grammar mistake.
Although this charlatan claims to know the answer to the universe, he only knows how to shout "42!!!".
This vociferous debater likes to make known his opinions in an irate manner.
These proverbs are used so often that they have now become inane platitudes.
This porous surface allows water to flow through.
This erudite man is irascible, so you need to hold your temper if you want to learn anything from him.
He is such a capricious person that you do not need to write a polemical piece of work to convince him that your views are correct.
Drug traffickers have used this country as a conduit for shipments to the US.
People with too much hubris usually use a lot of vituperation on people who dare contradict them.
This whimsical play, although funny, transgress our notions of morality.
Qiang people are know in common parlance as "ImBARR people".
Although this job requires you to be peripepatic, it is a remunerative job.
Her vivacious personality makes her very likeable.
This problem seems to have many solutions. I vacillated between DP and comp-geom, and spent so much time deciding between the two that I have no time left to complete my code.
This garrulous person can rhapsodise about anything for 42 years without stopping.
There are many recent reports of milk adulterated with melamine.
It is useless to continually hark back to the past.
He revelled in his new found fame.
As he is a stoic person, he can only show his emotions though his anthology of poems and short stories.
The Yellow River meanders across China, making a totaly of 97 turns (if I did not remember wrongly).
Cows like to meander over the grasslands and slowly nibble the grass.
This verbatim account of our interview is only possible due to the invention of the tape recorder.
Peasants live in squalors.
This bigot has a mellifluous voice, which he uses to manipulate others to believe in his point of view.
The schism of this huge Caucus has immense implications on the world.
Even though I am extremely busy now, I can vouchsafe a reply to your question about whether Israel will vouchsafe the Palestinians' return to their homeland.
Mutations have caused his legs to atrophy.
His didactic stories are very prosaic and make me want to sleep.
Spamming your sentences with grandiloquent words will result in circumlocutory replies that beat around the bush and are not direct and to the point.
Einstein believes in the mutability of space and time.
I spoke to my interlocutor in a coarse manner.
He is a philistine and cannot appreciate art or music, as he only knows how to mug.
Your should cut your straggly hair.
The AVL tree became emblematic of imBARRness.
The Harry Potter Series is a progeny of a train ride.
These bastions act as an bulwark against frontal attacks.
Fashion is ephemeral and evanescent, and changes every summer.
This despotic ruler is killed by the rebels.
He is always an amenable child, and listens to his parent's admonishments without a single objection.
Stop being so fickle; instead of changing your mind every second, set your heart down to doing something!
Even though BARR is, well, a BARR, people lionise him.
Bush was vilified in the press for starting the Iraq War.
He is a pious man, but he makes pious speeches, so do not harbour any pious hopes that he is sincere.
Uncle BARR gave an avuncular pat on BARR's shoulder.
This person is a pugnacious person who loves to fight with others.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
A treatise on RJTC.
Well, what to do when goaded by such a post? Your friendly chelonian RM-Sanctus here to expound on this variant of Chinese Chess.
So, allow me to demarcate the borders of this discussion. Firstly, the variant is the no-capture, bing-swap as in the previous post. In the second, invulnerability traps will apply at any instant (in the astronomically unlikely event a ma jumps into a wall of friendly pieces blocking the last check your opponent has and removing your last checking piece, it is a draw.)
Well. The value of pieces, I gather, is a subjective notion that cruxes on one's playstyle. For the most part, I agree with ph42's assessment of the values. However, let's dive a level deeper into this weighing.
When captures are out of the question, the concept of piece valuation takes on a different meaning. No longer is it a judgement of material on the board, or the likelihood of an endgame. Instead, it is a dynamic evaluation of the relative strengths of available pieces. Some pieces are inherently better at defending (xiang, shi, to some extent pao) while others are good at attacking (ju, very very much ma). Considering in light of this the units available:
Side bing: generally slows down your own attack, and does little for defence. Tempi can be traded by pushing one and forcing your opponent to mirror that to blockade. In stuck positions, can be the source of a slow flank attack. Not a great piece.
3rd/7th file bing: Closer to the king, the sides of the central river stalemates, and very dangerous if allowed to cross the river. Typically both sides push theirs in a race to the kings, or blockades with xiangs for a slower game.
Gokigen central bing: A default. Surprisingly fast if pushed crazily forward, yet easily stonewalled by standard defences (usually castles around the palace.)
GHB (Across river bing): Very scary. Harder to stop than before, and once it gets near a king, blood will follow soon. They can kick the general around with impunity, and are very likely to squash the king against his own pieces. Great Holy Bing.
Shi: The backbone of defence. Occasionally the appendices, performing little function but to throttle the general as he is contact checked to death. Still, these are essential in guarding 2 of 3 directions the king can be attacked from.
Xiang: Best used to stop 3rd/7th file bings, or to block irritating bottom-line attacks. They may only have 7 possible locations, but 5 are pretty important locations.
Ma: Main source of headaches. These things are horrible to move, making enforcement of the invulnerability rule brain-sapping to test for. The main bane of "invulnerable" fortresses, and a brilliant piece to probe for weaknesses with. If trapped on the wrong side of a barricade, though, they're quite useless (in defence particularly.)
Pao: A bing would sometimes be better. They move like jus, start in aggressive locations, and don't actually get to do much of the killing. Generally, they should stick to what they're good at: Posturing, locking up the opponent's flanks, the river, the palace, [everywhere], abusing their fast movement. Some pins, too.
Ju: The slow-to-develop, main killing piece. They speed through open lanes past blockades, but zigzag highways are their bane. Good for threateningly holding up river positions and half-open lanes.
Jiang/Shuai: ...
Do you seriously expect fei jiang (flying general) to be of ANY use here?
So those are the pieces. A typical game would flow something like this.
Opening phase: Key strategies are decided. Block the 3rd/7th bings? Try to stuff a pao into your opponent's palace fast? Swap pieces across the river or set up a nigh-impermeable roadblock? Important to consider are speed of bings, the open lanes that should be controlled by paos and jus a.s.a.p., and the opportunity to lock up pieces before they move, trapping them in a corner and thus creating a "material imbalance" of numbers.
Middlegame: If it's still pretty even after the opening, there are 2 possibilities. Firstly, both sides have pieces across the river, or perhaps 1 or 2 bing pairs have been swapped. A blitzing game ensues, where both sides race to deliver fatal charges and counterattacks faster than the other. Or, it's a delicate situation with the river choked with not a delta but a mess, in which case a slower game of attrition, temporary "shifting" blockades and side bing attacks follows.
Endgame: If one side has distinct material advantage near the opponent's palace, capitulation soon follows.
Positional evaluation is easy, but can be more subtle. The main rule of thumb is: the closer the centre of gravity of the board is to your king, the worse off you are.
I wonder who wants a game of this, on playOK or something?
So, allow me to demarcate the borders of this discussion. Firstly, the variant is the no-capture, bing-swap as in the previous post. In the second, invulnerability traps will apply at any instant (in the astronomically unlikely event a ma jumps into a wall of friendly pieces blocking the last check your opponent has and removing your last checking piece, it is a draw.)
Well. The value of pieces, I gather, is a subjective notion that cruxes on one's playstyle. For the most part, I agree with ph42's assessment of the values. However, let's dive a level deeper into this weighing.
When captures are out of the question, the concept of piece valuation takes on a different meaning. No longer is it a judgement of material on the board, or the likelihood of an endgame. Instead, it is a dynamic evaluation of the relative strengths of available pieces. Some pieces are inherently better at defending (xiang, shi, to some extent pao) while others are good at attacking (ju, very very much ma). Considering in light of this the units available:
Side bing: generally slows down your own attack, and does little for defence. Tempi can be traded by pushing one and forcing your opponent to mirror that to blockade. In stuck positions, can be the source of a slow flank attack. Not a great piece.
3rd/7th file bing: Closer to the king, the sides of the central river stalemates, and very dangerous if allowed to cross the river. Typically both sides push theirs in a race to the kings, or blockades with xiangs for a slower game.
Gokigen central bing: A default. Surprisingly fast if pushed crazily forward, yet easily stonewalled by standard defences (usually castles around the palace.)
GHB (Across river bing): Very scary. Harder to stop than before, and once it gets near a king, blood will follow soon. They can kick the general around with impunity, and are very likely to squash the king against his own pieces. Great Holy Bing.
Shi: The backbone of defence. Occasionally the appendices, performing little function but to throttle the general as he is contact checked to death. Still, these are essential in guarding 2 of 3 directions the king can be attacked from.
Xiang: Best used to stop 3rd/7th file bings, or to block irritating bottom-line attacks. They may only have 7 possible locations, but 5 are pretty important locations.
Ma: Main source of headaches. These things are horrible to move, making enforcement of the invulnerability rule brain-sapping to test for. The main bane of "invulnerable" fortresses, and a brilliant piece to probe for weaknesses with. If trapped on the wrong side of a barricade, though, they're quite useless (in defence particularly.)
Pao: A bing would sometimes be better. They move like jus, start in aggressive locations, and don't actually get to do much of the killing. Generally, they should stick to what they're good at: Posturing, locking up the opponent's flanks, the river, the palace, [everywhere], abusing their fast movement. Some pins, too.
Ju: The slow-to-develop, main killing piece. They speed through open lanes past blockades, but zigzag highways are their bane. Good for threateningly holding up river positions and half-open lanes.
Jiang/Shuai: ...
Do you seriously expect fei jiang (flying general) to be of ANY use here?
So those are the pieces. A typical game would flow something like this.
Opening phase: Key strategies are decided. Block the 3rd/7th bings? Try to stuff a pao into your opponent's palace fast? Swap pieces across the river or set up a nigh-impermeable roadblock? Important to consider are speed of bings, the open lanes that should be controlled by paos and jus a.s.a.p., and the opportunity to lock up pieces before they move, trapping them in a corner and thus creating a "material imbalance" of numbers.
Middlegame: If it's still pretty even after the opening, there are 2 possibilities. Firstly, both sides have pieces across the river, or perhaps 1 or 2 bing pairs have been swapped. A blitzing game ensues, where both sides race to deliver fatal charges and counterattacks faster than the other. Or, it's a delicate situation with the river choked with not a delta but a mess, in which case a slower game of attrition, temporary "shifting" blockades and side bing attacks follows.
Endgame: If one side has distinct material advantage near the opponent's palace, capitulation soon follows.
Positional evaluation is easy, but can be more subtle. The main rule of thumb is: the closer the centre of gravity of the board is to your king, the worse off you are.
I wonder who wants a game of this, on playOK or something?
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Boring holidays...
The holidays are officially making me feel bored, and as such I shall talk about stuff today. Ever since Tux has started posting despicable vocabulary to instill sheer terror into the hearts of all those not protected by a lexicon, ethereal or corporeal, I have thought that this blog was getting diluted. And hence I guess... RJT Chess!
Yes, it's that no capture chess again.
Today I shall be talking about RJT chess in general, as nobody (really) has bothered to play this modern variant of chess, where no blood is spilled (apart from splitting headaches).
So firstly, the value of pieces.
Bah! Zerothly, I shall be talking about the variant where pawn swaps are allowed (Carnage of the bings!) and as far as I can remember, no other weird new rules.
Back to firstly. I must roughly give an idea of what the value of pieces could possibly mean in a chess that has totally nothing to do with trading pieces and praying that somehow it was a good trade for you. Also, the value of pieces does not accurately reflect how likely they are to wreck havoc in your opponent's base and win you the game. For such a turtlish (check RM-Sanctus' dictionary and possibly mind for details) variant of chess, if you want to win, you must get many many pieces, or actually, all your pieces as close to your opponent's king as possible. And he can still block... But with enough luck and perseverance, you will eventually force the game to an end (in somebody's favour, and after an innocent couple hundred moves).
I know this sounds like an essay written by a stressed student trying to write a story but failing to think of ideas, giving rise to lengthy preambles, but hey, the context is suspiciously similar.
Fret not! I have content *hurries to make up nonsense on the spot*.
So what do I exactly mean by value? Value is the amount of headache a piece can cause your opponent.
Yet again, I deviate to put across a more complete picture.
...
... ...
... ... ...
Imagine.
Imagine...
You are playing RJT Chess with your friend, and it is in the middle of the afternoon, and you are sitting on a stuffy table without a fan. Or air-conditioning.
You take out a flimsy chessboard, and start playing.
Time seeps by, and flies like an arrow, at the rate of 0.0167 minutes/s.
Without your knowledge, it is already dinnertime. And the match still isn't over.
Moral of story? RJT Chess is really a game of attrition at high levels, and whoever gets a migraine first loses.
As a result, here's a rank of the value of pieces, from the pieces that stone and rot in a corner of the board for the entire game, to the ones that jump around and cause chaos.
1) Advisor (shi) -- Pretty useless, doesn't even block the king probably most of the time.
2) Elephant/Minister (xiang) -- Can block 2 bings from crossing the river. And will probably rot there until the end of time as well.
3) Cannon (pao) -- These insanely tricky things in the actual Chinese Chess tend to fester quickly in RJT Chess, as violence is no longer permitted.
4) Chariot (ju/che) -- These things are rather easily blocked, and hardly cause a headache.
5) Bing (!!) -- Once these creatures get near, the game draws to a conclusion. The king cannot run too much, or risk invulnerability (and hence breaking a rule), yet once checked by a bing, the game is almost over.
6) Horse (ma) -- Always the source of checks, on average 14.159 moves checks to be exact. These things are your Lodanap.
7) King (jiang) -- need I say more?
Yes, it's that no capture chess again.
Today I shall be talking about RJT chess in general, as nobody (really) has bothered to play this modern variant of chess, where no blood is spilled (apart from splitting headaches).
So firstly, the value of pieces.
Bah! Zerothly, I shall be talking about the variant where pawn swaps are allowed (Carnage of the bings!) and as far as I can remember, no other weird new rules.
Back to firstly. I must roughly give an idea of what the value of pieces could possibly mean in a chess that has totally nothing to do with trading pieces and praying that somehow it was a good trade for you. Also, the value of pieces does not accurately reflect how likely they are to wreck havoc in your opponent's base and win you the game. For such a turtlish (check RM-Sanctus' dictionary and possibly mind for details) variant of chess, if you want to win, you must get many many pieces, or actually, all your pieces as close to your opponent's king as possible. And he can still block... But with enough luck and perseverance, you will eventually force the game to an end (in somebody's favour, and after an innocent couple hundred moves).
I know this sounds like an essay written by a stressed student trying to write a story but failing to think of ideas, giving rise to lengthy preambles, but hey, the context is suspiciously similar.
Fret not! I have content *hurries to make up nonsense on the spot*.
So what do I exactly mean by value? Value is the amount of headache a piece can cause your opponent.
Yet again, I deviate to put across a more complete picture.
...
... ...
... ... ...
Imagine.
Imagine...
You are playing RJT Chess with your friend, and it is in the middle of the afternoon, and you are sitting on a stuffy table without a fan. Or air-conditioning.
You take out a flimsy chessboard, and start playing.
Time seeps by, and flies like an arrow, at the rate of 0.0167 minutes/s.
Without your knowledge, it is already dinnertime. And the match still isn't over.
Moral of story? RJT Chess is really a game of attrition at high levels, and whoever gets a migraine first loses.
As a result, here's a rank of the value of pieces, from the pieces that stone and rot in a corner of the board for the entire game, to the ones that jump around and cause chaos.
1) Advisor (shi) -- Pretty useless, doesn't even block the king probably most of the time.
2) Elephant/Minister (xiang) -- Can block 2 bings from crossing the river. And will probably rot there until the end of time as well.
3) Cannon (pao) -- These insanely tricky things in the actual Chinese Chess tend to fester quickly in RJT Chess, as violence is no longer permitted.
4) Chariot (ju/che) -- These things are rather easily blocked, and hardly cause a headache.
5) Bing (!!) -- Once these creatures get near, the game draws to a conclusion. The king cannot run too much, or risk invulnerability (and hence breaking a rule), yet once checked by a bing, the game is almost over.
6) Horse (ma) -- Always the source of checks, on average 14.159 moves checks to be exact. These things are your Lodanap.
7) King (jiang) -- need I say more?
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Post Vocab-Mugging Session 2
Your corpulence is a result of 100 chocolate bars a day.
You cannot be so insular; get yourself exposed to different opinions and perspectives.
Killing witnesses is an expedient way of getting rid of evidence.
Depreciation is an econs term (Yay I learnt something econs! =D).
The countryside has verdant fields and grasslands.
I shall manipulate these pliable minds and use them to conquer the world.
Liu Xiang just had a facile victory; he had no strong competitors anyway.
These medications only had a palliative effect as it only solves the minutiae problems.
Stop being more querulous; this nascent security system is still susceptible to viral attacks (from BARR).
Even though he is a neophyte in physics, he is already crammed full of jargons (like fine structure constant!!! =D).
He is pursuing a monastic life in order to repent for his act of larceny.
The general is giving a harangue to the soldiers so that their cerebral cords get stimulated and battle-ready.
Quantum mechanics is inscrutable.
The ageing buildings and collapsing structures are redolent of the place's long history.
Even though he is a convivial person, that does not mean that he is not culpable for the wrongdoing he has done.
His apparently solicitous remarks are too histrionic, showing that he is trying to be sarcastic.
He is such a sycophant, always trying to toady to the CEOs of monolithic corporations.
I shall get a good harvest in these arable fields.
A compendious study of the various parameters led him to posit that P = NP.
Children have the tendency to become maudlin when they lose their Pikachu soft-toy.
I have a predilection for Pokemon.
You cannot be so insular; get yourself exposed to different opinions and perspectives.
Killing witnesses is an expedient way of getting rid of evidence.
Depreciation is an econs term (Yay I learnt something econs! =D).
The countryside has verdant fields and grasslands.
I shall manipulate these pliable minds and use them to conquer the world.
Liu Xiang just had a facile victory; he had no strong competitors anyway.
These medications only had a palliative effect as it only solves the minutiae problems.
Stop being more querulous; this nascent security system is still susceptible to viral attacks (from BARR).
Even though he is a neophyte in physics, he is already crammed full of jargons (like fine structure constant!!! =D).
He is pursuing a monastic life in order to repent for his act of larceny.
The general is giving a harangue to the soldiers so that their cerebral cords get stimulated and battle-ready.
Quantum mechanics is inscrutable.
The ageing buildings and collapsing structures are redolent of the place's long history.
Even though he is a convivial person, that does not mean that he is not culpable for the wrongdoing he has done.
His apparently solicitous remarks are too histrionic, showing that he is trying to be sarcastic.
He is such a sycophant, always trying to toady to the CEOs of monolithic corporations.
I shall get a good harvest in these arable fields.
A compendious study of the various parameters led him to posit that P = NP.
Children have the tendency to become maudlin when they lose their Pikachu soft-toy.
I have a predilection for Pokemon.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Post Vocab-Mugging Session 1 (edited)
I am not a failure; I am a fiasco!
Your ineffectual arguments do not buttress your position. (no e in argument)
Stop being so vacuous. Think more.
Stop jumping about! Why are you so boisterous?
This has gone from bad to worse. I must ameliorate the situation.
OMG, you are so rich. You lead such an opulent lifestyle.
The perennial headaches are giving me ... well ... headaches.
We must keep this classified project clandestine.
Don't be so boorish. Mr Cheong does not like rude people.
Everyone saw that you cheated, and yet you brazenly deny it.
If you are a globetrotter, you visit the world in 80 days.
Your vitriolic remarks against the disabled just shows how callow you are.
CCX is the zenith (actually its epitomy, but nvm) of humility. (No, actually it's epitome)
Chops has an eclectic taste of music. He does not just listen to rock or pop; he listens to everything (including growls and roars).
Your ineffectual arguments do not buttress your position. (no e in argument)
Stop being so vacuous. Think more.
Stop jumping about! Why are you so boisterous?
This has gone from bad to worse. I must ameliorate the situation.
OMG, you are so rich. You lead such an opulent lifestyle.
The perennial headaches are giving me ... well ... headaches.
We must keep this classified project clandestine.
Don't be so boorish. Mr Cheong does not like rude people.
Everyone saw that you cheated, and yet you brazenly deny it.
If you are a globetrotter, you visit the world in 80 days.
Your vitriolic remarks against the disabled just shows how callow you are.
CCX is the zenith (actually its epitomy, but nvm) of humility. (No, actually it's epitome)
Chops has an eclectic taste of music. He does not just listen to rock or pop; he listens to everything (including growls and roars).
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Scripts
I present 3 scripts: 2 of them written for actual presentations, by me and the newest coauthor of this blog, and one by the not-so-new coauthor (RMS), for fun. Challenge yourself, and see how fast you can identify the 2 scripts which were painstakingly worked on (actually only 1, but 2 were actually used!).
The 3 scripts are shown below. Enjoy.
Script 1: Remedies at a distance
--------------------------------
Telemedicine can form a key component of our everyday lives. Imagine going to the doctor's, queuing up to take a number, and waiting for hours on end, every second of agony in illness, multiplying the chance to contract another bug from your fellow sufferers.
We offer you another way out.
With the benefits of telemedicine, anybody - but in particular those who apply to receive its benefits - can enjoy the luxuries of treatment at home. Diagnosis is easily done by a mere description of symptoms, no reason to require a face-to-face interview with a practitioner; a simple videoconference (facilities not provided) will suffice. This stands to offer a whole host of benefits to the users, namely:
- Convenience
- Time-saving due to lack of travel and waiting times
- Psychological comfort of a readily-accessible treatment
- Lower chance of being infected by a TV screen than a flu-ridden sleepwalker
Long-distance monitoring also gifts the ability to divine physiological data of the user anytime, at any convenient location; it also offers conveniently a means to tag one's location such that medication can be delivered, or aid be sent to, should the need arise.
There may be a few non-believing heret- sorry, skeptics, who might view telemedicine from a rather more pessimistic, non-agreeable fashion, choosing to illuminate and expound its drawbacks while cheerfully discarding its guaranteed salvations. Allow me to elucidate sequentially and systematically refute each incorrect accusation:
1. There may be insufficient people to staff the system.
- Telemedicine's focus is on the use of IT to bring the patient-doctor interaction into a new medium, through new windows and adds depth and colour to the otherwise transactional meeting. A lack of doctors is the least of the concerns of the system; nonetheless, a friendly non-Turing compliant "AI" virtual receptionist will be made available to stall patients' otherwise incessant and - pardon me - downright puerile demands for instant consultations.
2. Medication in the physical form is absent.
- Telemedicine, despite the name, does not encourage drug abuse nor pill-taking in any way. It is simply a medium through which patients can talk to their doctors, and for doctors to check on their patients remotely. Any requirements for antibiotics or their ilk may be sent via e-mail or, more slowly, snail-mail. In urgent cases, patients are advised to have a ground-floor window open. Under no circumstances do we wish to precipitate illegal substance usage.
3. The elderly/non-tech-savvy individuals may not be able to utilise the system.
- Much like its cousins CCTV cameras and endoscopes, telemedicine provides a modicum of independence, allowing medical professionals full coverage and operational control of the relevant systems. Little to no technical ability is required on the part of the end-user, save the ability to use, debug and troubleshoot teleconferencing equipment and to conduct self-maintenance of the observation systems.
Having thus addressed surely the most pertinent concerns, we would now like to turn your attention to the future expandability of our project. We have taken Changi Prison as our first case study, and hope to expand the scope of our project to a similar extent, noting the first-rate observation coverage and response times of personnel manning the 'eye in the sky' systems there. Given more resources, a national telemedicine framework could be adopted, perhaps even living up to the pervasion envisaged groundbreakingly in George Orwell's 1984. With such a comprehensive system in place, nobody ever need be afraid of falling ill, for aid is always on the lookout, and help always around the corner. Thank you.
Script 2: Norway -- A Case Study
--------------------------------
I will now proceed to talk about our case study: Norway.
A question springs to mind: what makes Norway an ideal case study?
The reasons are many. The first is that Norway has a long history of telemedicine, giving sufficient time for its impact to be detailed.
Also, Norway has not only successfully implemented telemedicine, but also has had positive outcomes as a result of telemedicine. This makes it a good model for telemedicine in Singapore.
Having seen why we chose Norway as a case study, I shall now briefly talk about telemedicine in Norway.
Norway has an extremely low population density. This leads to problems such as unwillingness to work in rural areas and the economic unviability of setting up clinics in rural areas. Coupled with a rapidly ageing population, which brings along with it a host of problems, as previously mentioned, this makes it hard to offer quality healthcare to all Norwegians.
However, with robust communication technologies already in place, telemedicine was a logical choice to solve these problems.
Norway has implemented the Norwegian Health Net, which spans over more than 700 doctors and 25 hospitals. All GPs and private specialists use EHR, containing information of 80% of patients. Also, applications supplementing EHR such as the Picture Archiving and Communications System, an application to transfer medical pictures, come packaged with the EHR. We can thus say that EHR is highly developed in Norway.
Telemonitoring in Norway is also highly developed, and widely adopted. The pictures shown here depict a telemonitoring suite for the elderly, and even has specialised telemonitoring functions built into appliances like the television.
Teleconsultation is also widely applied in Norway, and spans fields such as telepsychology and teleradiology, and includes both doctor-to-doctor and patient-to-doctor communications.
So how did Norway achieve all this?
After researching, we found that the key steps to implementing telemedicine in Norway includes developing a centralised communications network, which connects the nation's doctors, implementing reimbursement policies for telemedicine for patients, as well as developing educational opportunities for telemedicine. This includes offering telemedicine courses at the National University of Tromso. Also, the Norwegian government has developed a set of standards for EHR and information exchange, volven.
Having seen how Norway implemented telemedicine, I will proceed to describe the benefits and drawbacks of EHR and telehomecare.
The EHR reduces human errors by digitalising the recording process. It also increases the efficiency of treatment, since doctors no longer need to manually search through piles of paper records. Furthermore, the information is more complete and reliable, as it is corroborated across each clinic the patient has been to, and lastly, the EHR leads to cost savings derived in part from less paperwork.
Yet, EHR has its fair share of drawbacks, namely prohibitive startup costs and a steep learning curve of the technology, which leads to diminished efficiency in the short run as doctors struggle to use the program.
This diagram summarises the advantages and impacts of EHR.
Telehomecare has many benefits. It reduces clinical and hospital visits, as patients can now be treated at home instead of at the hospital. This is especially true for routine checkups and minor illnesses, and is a great blessing for sufferers of chronic diseases. The constant monitoring through remote devices also results in more responsive healthcare, leading to improved outcomes for patients. For elderly patients with chronic illnesses, telehomecare can improve their functional independence. Also, the reduction of visits to medical facilities can bring about time savings as well has the reduction of travelling costs.
Telehomecare also has its drawbacks, including high startup costs, issues associated with the open nature of the Internet through which information is sent, as well as the lack of a clear common standard for telehomecare devices, meaning some technologies may be mutually incompatible.
The following slide summarises the advantages and drawbacks of telehomecare.
Script 3: Telemedicine is coming to town
----------------------------------------
To evaluate whether telemedicine is applicable locally, we need to answer the following questions about the plausibility of local implementation, and the applicability of Norway’s lessons.
Telemedicine is highly plausible in Singapore.
Firstly, there is strong funding and support from the government because the government is also actively seeking to improve the healthcare system and is seriously considering telemedicine as a solution.
Secondly, many telemedicine prerequisites are already implemented, such as a nationwide high-speed transmission network required by EHR, are already implemented.
Thirdly, Singapore implemented pilot telemedicine project in the past, and thus already has some prior knowledge in this area.
The above reasons show that successful local telemedicine implementation is highly plausible.
Telemedicine is highly relevant to Singapore. But exactly what kind of changes do we expect for both the doctors and patients. We want to share some of the more exciting implications here.
One immediate change doctors experience is the digitalization of patient records. This has immense implications. Gone are the days where finding patient records is a chore. Electronic records allows doctors to easily access, retrieve and update patient information without going through the tedious paperwork that is needed when keeping physical records. This saves a lot of time and frees up medical personnel to devote more time to the care of the patients.
Furthermore, the EHR connects all doctors under a single system, allowing doctor to share and discuss past records of the patient. In this case, the patient will not be treated by a single doctor anymore. He will be treated by the combined and collaborated efforts of all the doctors connected under the EHR. This allows better treatment to be administered to the patient.
The implications for patients are even more promising. With telehomecare, they will be able to receive treatment at the comfort of their home, under the care of their loved ones. Studies have shown that care in such home environments immensely benefit the patient’s condition. Regular trips to medical centres, especially for those with chronic illnesses, are waived, providing great convenience for the patients.
The development of new telemonitoring devices, from wristwatches that tracks your glucose level to shirts that tracks your heart rate, also allows easy and constant monitoring of the patient’s condition. This effectively allows doctors to keep track of the patient’s condition. They can also easily relate to patients changes in the treatment given, without troubling the patient to visit them in their medical centres.
Undeniably, telemedicine shows much promise and can bring a smile to the faces of both patients and doctors.
Now that we established the promise and viability of telemedicine in Singapore, we need to start implementing. Firstly, we drew some lessons that we learnt from Norway.
From the difficulties that Norway faced, we came up with some areas of improvement that needs to be worked upon. We need to set up common standards in telemedicine implementation to allow for the inter-operability of telemedicine in different medical centres. We also need to provide support to ensure long-term sustainability of telemedicine, and subsidies to attract more users. Measures to ensure the privacy and security of medical information should also be in place. As such measures are geared towards building the foundation of telemedicine, we derived from these our guiding principle of structural development.
Next, we noticed that telemedicine users need to be fairly proficient in telemedicine in order to get the most out of it. Therefore, we aim to provide educational opportunities for telemedicine. This is under our guiding principle Education.
The 3 scripts are shown below. Enjoy.
Script 1: Remedies at a distance
--------------------------------
Telemedicine can form a key component of our everyday lives. Imagine going to the doctor's, queuing up to take a number, and waiting for hours on end, every second of agony in illness, multiplying the chance to contract another bug from your fellow sufferers.
We offer you another way out.
With the benefits of telemedicine, anybody - but in particular those who apply to receive its benefits - can enjoy the luxuries of treatment at home. Diagnosis is easily done by a mere description of symptoms, no reason to require a face-to-face interview with a practitioner; a simple videoconference (facilities not provided) will suffice. This stands to offer a whole host of benefits to the users, namely:
- Convenience
- Time-saving due to lack of travel and waiting times
- Psychological comfort of a readily-accessible treatment
- Lower chance of being infected by a TV screen than a flu-ridden sleepwalker
Long-distance monitoring also gifts the ability to divine physiological data of the user anytime, at any convenient location; it also offers conveniently a means to tag one's location such that medication can be delivered, or aid be sent to, should the need arise.
There may be a few non-believing heret- sorry, skeptics, who might view telemedicine from a rather more pessimistic, non-agreeable fashion, choosing to illuminate and expound its drawbacks while cheerfully discarding its guaranteed salvations. Allow me to elucidate sequentially and systematically refute each incorrect accusation:
1. There may be insufficient people to staff the system.
- Telemedicine's focus is on the use of IT to bring the patient-doctor interaction into a new medium, through new windows and adds depth and colour to the otherwise transactional meeting. A lack of doctors is the least of the concerns of the system; nonetheless, a friendly non-Turing compliant "AI" virtual receptionist will be made available to stall patients' otherwise incessant and - pardon me - downright puerile demands for instant consultations.
2. Medication in the physical form is absent.
- Telemedicine, despite the name, does not encourage drug abuse nor pill-taking in any way. It is simply a medium through which patients can talk to their doctors, and for doctors to check on their patients remotely. Any requirements for antibiotics or their ilk may be sent via e-mail or, more slowly, snail-mail. In urgent cases, patients are advised to have a ground-floor window open. Under no circumstances do we wish to precipitate illegal substance usage.
3. The elderly/non-tech-savvy individuals may not be able to utilise the system.
- Much like its cousins CCTV cameras and endoscopes, telemedicine provides a modicum of independence, allowing medical professionals full coverage and operational control of the relevant systems. Little to no technical ability is required on the part of the end-user, save the ability to use, debug and troubleshoot teleconferencing equipment and to conduct self-maintenance of the observation systems.
Having thus addressed surely the most pertinent concerns, we would now like to turn your attention to the future expandability of our project. We have taken Changi Prison as our first case study, and hope to expand the scope of our project to a similar extent, noting the first-rate observation coverage and response times of personnel manning the 'eye in the sky' systems there. Given more resources, a national telemedicine framework could be adopted, perhaps even living up to the pervasion envisaged groundbreakingly in George Orwell's 1984. With such a comprehensive system in place, nobody ever need be afraid of falling ill, for aid is always on the lookout, and help always around the corner. Thank you.
Script 2: Norway -- A Case Study
--------------------------------
I will now proceed to talk about our case study: Norway.
A question springs to mind: what makes Norway an ideal case study?
The reasons are many. The first is that Norway has a long history of telemedicine, giving sufficient time for its impact to be detailed.
Also, Norway has not only successfully implemented telemedicine, but also has had positive outcomes as a result of telemedicine. This makes it a good model for telemedicine in Singapore.
Having seen why we chose Norway as a case study, I shall now briefly talk about telemedicine in Norway.
Norway has an extremely low population density. This leads to problems such as unwillingness to work in rural areas and the economic unviability of setting up clinics in rural areas. Coupled with a rapidly ageing population, which brings along with it a host of problems, as previously mentioned, this makes it hard to offer quality healthcare to all Norwegians.
However, with robust communication technologies already in place, telemedicine was a logical choice to solve these problems.
Norway has implemented the Norwegian Health Net, which spans over more than 700 doctors and 25 hospitals. All GPs and private specialists use EHR, containing information of 80% of patients. Also, applications supplementing EHR such as the Picture Archiving and Communications System, an application to transfer medical pictures, come packaged with the EHR. We can thus say that EHR is highly developed in Norway.
Telemonitoring in Norway is also highly developed, and widely adopted. The pictures shown here depict a telemonitoring suite for the elderly, and even has specialised telemonitoring functions built into appliances like the television.
Teleconsultation is also widely applied in Norway, and spans fields such as telepsychology and teleradiology, and includes both doctor-to-doctor and patient-to-doctor communications.
So how did Norway achieve all this?
After researching, we found that the key steps to implementing telemedicine in Norway includes developing a centralised communications network, which connects the nation's doctors, implementing reimbursement policies for telemedicine for patients, as well as developing educational opportunities for telemedicine. This includes offering telemedicine courses at the National University of Tromso. Also, the Norwegian government has developed a set of standards for EHR and information exchange, volven.
Having seen how Norway implemented telemedicine, I will proceed to describe the benefits and drawbacks of EHR and telehomecare.
The EHR reduces human errors by digitalising the recording process. It also increases the efficiency of treatment, since doctors no longer need to manually search through piles of paper records. Furthermore, the information is more complete and reliable, as it is corroborated across each clinic the patient has been to, and lastly, the EHR leads to cost savings derived in part from less paperwork.
Yet, EHR has its fair share of drawbacks, namely prohibitive startup costs and a steep learning curve of the technology, which leads to diminished efficiency in the short run as doctors struggle to use the program.
This diagram summarises the advantages and impacts of EHR.
Telehomecare has many benefits. It reduces clinical and hospital visits, as patients can now be treated at home instead of at the hospital. This is especially true for routine checkups and minor illnesses, and is a great blessing for sufferers of chronic diseases. The constant monitoring through remote devices also results in more responsive healthcare, leading to improved outcomes for patients. For elderly patients with chronic illnesses, telehomecare can improve their functional independence. Also, the reduction of visits to medical facilities can bring about time savings as well has the reduction of travelling costs.
Telehomecare also has its drawbacks, including high startup costs, issues associated with the open nature of the Internet through which information is sent, as well as the lack of a clear common standard for telehomecare devices, meaning some technologies may be mutually incompatible.
The following slide summarises the advantages and drawbacks of telehomecare.
Script 3: Telemedicine is coming to town
----------------------------------------
To evaluate whether telemedicine is applicable locally, we need to answer the following questions about the plausibility of local implementation, and the applicability of Norway’s lessons.
Telemedicine is highly plausible in Singapore.
Firstly, there is strong funding and support from the government because the government is also actively seeking to improve the healthcare system and is seriously considering telemedicine as a solution.
Secondly, many telemedicine prerequisites are already implemented, such as a nationwide high-speed transmission network required by EHR, are already implemented.
Thirdly, Singapore implemented pilot telemedicine project in the past, and thus already has some prior knowledge in this area.
The above reasons show that successful local telemedicine implementation is highly plausible.
Telemedicine is highly relevant to Singapore. But exactly what kind of changes do we expect for both the doctors and patients. We want to share some of the more exciting implications here.
One immediate change doctors experience is the digitalization of patient records. This has immense implications. Gone are the days where finding patient records is a chore. Electronic records allows doctors to easily access, retrieve and update patient information without going through the tedious paperwork that is needed when keeping physical records. This saves a lot of time and frees up medical personnel to devote more time to the care of the patients.
Furthermore, the EHR connects all doctors under a single system, allowing doctor to share and discuss past records of the patient. In this case, the patient will not be treated by a single doctor anymore. He will be treated by the combined and collaborated efforts of all the doctors connected under the EHR. This allows better treatment to be administered to the patient.
The implications for patients are even more promising. With telehomecare, they will be able to receive treatment at the comfort of their home, under the care of their loved ones. Studies have shown that care in such home environments immensely benefit the patient’s condition. Regular trips to medical centres, especially for those with chronic illnesses, are waived, providing great convenience for the patients.
The development of new telemonitoring devices, from wristwatches that tracks your glucose level to shirts that tracks your heart rate, also allows easy and constant monitoring of the patient’s condition. This effectively allows doctors to keep track of the patient’s condition. They can also easily relate to patients changes in the treatment given, without troubling the patient to visit them in their medical centres.
Undeniably, telemedicine shows much promise and can bring a smile to the faces of both patients and doctors.
Now that we established the promise and viability of telemedicine in Singapore, we need to start implementing. Firstly, we drew some lessons that we learnt from Norway.
From the difficulties that Norway faced, we came up with some areas of improvement that needs to be worked upon. We need to set up common standards in telemedicine implementation to allow for the inter-operability of telemedicine in different medical centres. We also need to provide support to ensure long-term sustainability of telemedicine, and subsidies to attract more users. Measures to ensure the privacy and security of medical information should also be in place. As such measures are geared towards building the foundation of telemedicine, we derived from these our guiding principle of structural development.
Next, we noticed that telemedicine users need to be fairly proficient in telemedicine in order to get the most out of it. Therefore, we aim to provide educational opportunities for telemedicine. This is under our guiding principle Education.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
The land of the sticks
In the land of the sticks, there was once a great committee of 52 stickmen. The committee was made out of wise sticks from all over the land and sea, and it governed the laws of the land of the sticks.
The committee was divided into 4 subcommittees, S, H, C, and S', each comprising of 13 members, officially known as A,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,J,Q,K.
At the head of the committee, was a tall and long stick, called Chopstick. He was the pinnacle of the committee (due to h8), and he stood tall, towering above the committee on the podium one day, and with a booming voice he nearly roared, "Today, we have a chemical bonding exercise. The purpose of this exercise is to improve the chemistry of members of the committee, as well as to make sure the members of the committee are strongly bonded."
"In this exercise, you will first do 20 pushups (O,N,E,1,T,W,O,2,...) and 5 chinups, and then get into your assigned groups."
The truth is, Chopstick had not assigned the groups.
To make matters worse, each person in Stickland hates exactly 3 people in the committee, and it would be counterproductive to put 2 sticks who hate each other in the same group.
Chopstick wants to minimise the number of groups, as the efficiency of his program to analyse the data of each group runs in O(n!) time.
Given that Chopstick is a very unlucky stick (Worst case scenario), state the minimum number of groups possible.
The committee was divided into 4 subcommittees, S, H, C, and S', each comprising of 13 members, officially known as A,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,J,Q,K.
At the head of the committee, was a tall and long stick, called Chopstick. He was the pinnacle of the committee (due to h8), and he stood tall, towering above the committee on the podium one day, and with a booming voice he nearly roared, "Today, we have a chemical bonding exercise. The purpose of this exercise is to improve the chemistry of members of the committee, as well as to make sure the members of the committee are strongly bonded."
"In this exercise, you will first do 20 pushups (O,N,E,1,T,W,O,2,...) and 5 chinups, and then get into your assigned groups."
The truth is, Chopstick had not assigned the groups.
To make matters worse, each person in Stickland hates exactly 3 people in the committee, and it would be counterproductive to put 2 sticks who hate each other in the same group.
Chopstick wants to minimise the number of groups, as the efficiency of his program to analyse the data of each group runs in O(n!) time.
Given that Chopstick is a very unlucky stick (Worst case scenario), state the minimum number of groups possible.
Monday, November 1, 2010
True Meaning of King's Gambit Declined
This is what it truly means to advance deep into the enemy territory and come out alive.
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.11.01"]
[White "Windarcher"]
[Black "TheProNewb"]
[Result "0-1"]
[WhiteElo "1856"]
[BlackElo "2292"]
[TimeControl "1|0"]
[Termination "TheProNewb won by checkmate"]
1.b3 e6 2.Bb2 Ke7 3.g3 Kd6 4.Bg2 Kc5 5.d3 Kb4 6.e3 a5 7.Ne2 a4 8.a3+ Kb5 9.b4 c5 10.c3 d6
11.Nd2 d5 12.Qc2 Kc6 13.O-O b5 14.c4 Kb6 15.cxd5 exd5 16.e4 d4 17.e5 Ra7 18.bxc5+ Bxc5 19.Rab1 Rc7 20.Qd1 Be6
21.Nf3 Nc6 22.Nfxd4 Nxd4 23.Nxd4 Bxd4 24.Bxd4+ Qxd4 25.Re1 Bb3 26.Qd2 Ne7 27.Re4 Qc5 28.e6 f5 29.Rf4 g5 30.Rf3 Bd5
31.Re3 Bxg2 32.Kxg2 f4 33.Re2 Nf5 34.gxf4 Qd5+ 35.f3 Nd4 36.Re5 Qxf3+ 37.Kg1 Rc2 38.Qb4 Qg2# 0-1
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.11.01"]
[White "Windarcher"]
[Black "TheProNewb"]
[Result "0-1"]
[WhiteElo "1856"]
[BlackElo "2292"]
[TimeControl "1|0"]
[Termination "TheProNewb won on time"]
1.h3 d6 2.g3 Kd7 3.Bg2 Ke6 4.b3 Ke5 5.Bb2+ Kf5 6.d3 h5 7.e3 h4 8.g4+ Kg5 9.Qf3 e5 10.Qd1 Nc6
11.Ne2 d5 12.Nd2 f5 13.Ng1 Kh6 14.gxf5 g5 15.fxg6 Kxg6 16.Qe2 Nf6 17.O-O-O Bf5 18.f4 e4 19.dxe4 dxe4 20.Bxf6 Qxf6
21.Kb1 Ba3 22.c3 Qxc3 23.Nc4 Be7 24.Qc2 Qxc2+ 25.Kxc2 Rad8 26.Ne2 Bf6 27.Nd4 Nxd4+ 28.exd4 Rxd4 29.Rde1 c5 30.Ne5+ Bxe5
31.fxe5 Rhd8 32.Rhg1 Kf7 33.Bf3 Ke6 34.Be2 Kxe5 35.Bg4 Rd2+ 36.Kb1 Bxg4 37.Rxg4 R8d4 38.Rg5+ Kd6 39.Rg4 Kc6 40.Rxh4 Kb5
0-1
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.11.01"]
[White "TheProNewb"]
[Black "Windarcher"]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteElo "2292"]
[BlackElo "1856"]
[TimeControl "1|0"]
[Termination "TheProNewb won by resignation"]
1.d3 b6 2.Kd2 Bb7 3.Ke3 g6 4.Kd4 Bg7+ 5.Kc4 e6 6.Kb3 d6 7.c4 Nd7 8.Nc3 Ne7 9.e4 a5 10.Be3 Ba6
11.Ka4 Qb8 12.f4 c6 13.Nf3 b5+ 14.cxb5 Bxb5+ 15.Ka3 Bxc3 16.bxc3 Nc5 17.Rb1 Na6 18.c4 Qc7 19.cxb5 cxb5 20.Qc1 b4+
21.Kb2 Qb6 22.Bxb6 1-0
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.11.01"]
[White "Windarcher"]
[Black "TheProNewb"]
[Result "0-1"]
[WhiteElo "1856"]
[BlackElo "2292"]
[TimeControl "1|0"]
[Termination "TheProNewb won by resignation"]
1.g3 e6 2.Bg2 Ke7 3.b3 Kd6 4.Bb2 Kc5 5.d3 Kb4 6.e3 a5 7.Qd2+ Kb5 8.Ne2 a4 9.Qc3 a3 10.Qc4+ Kb6
11.Qb4+ Bxb4+ 0-1
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.11.01"]
[White "TheProNewb"]
[Black "Windarcher"]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteElo "2292"]
[BlackElo "1856"]
[TimeControl "1|0"]
[Termination "TheProNewb won by resignation"]
1.d4 b6 2.Kd2 Bb7 3.Kd3 g6 4.e4 Bg7 5.Nc3 d5 6.e5 f6 7.f4 fxe5 8.Nf3 exf4 9.Bxf4 e6 10.Qd2 Nc6
11.Bg5 Qd7 12.Qf4 Nge7 13.Re1 O-O-O 14.h4 Rdf8 15.Qg4 h6 16.Bf4 Nb4+ 17.Kd2 Nxa2 18.Nxa2 Qa4 19.Nc3 Bxd4 20.Nxa4
1-0
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.11.01"]
[White "Windarcher"]
[Black "TheProNewb"]
[Result "0-1"]
[WhiteElo "1856"]
[BlackElo "2292"]
[TimeControl "1|0"]
[Termination "TheProNewb won by resignation"]
1.g3 f6 2.Bg2 Kf7 3.b3 Kg6 4.Bb2 Kh5 5.h4 Kg4 6.e3+ Kf5 7.Bh3+ Kg6 8.h5+ Kf7 9.h6 g6 10.d3 Nxh6
11.Nd2 Ng8 12.g4 Bg7 13.Qb1 d5 14.g5 f5 15.f4 e5 16.fxe5 Be6 17.d4 c5 18.Ne2 Nc6 19.Nf3 b5 20.Qd1 c4
21.Qd2 Qd7 22.Qc3 b4 23.Qd2 c3 24.Qc1 a5 25.Qd1 Nge7 26.Rb1 cxb2 27.Rxb2 Rhb8 0-1
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.11.01"]
[White "TheProNewb"]
[Black "Windarcher"]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteElo "2292"]
[BlackElo "1856"]
[TimeControl "1|0"]
[Termination "TheProNewb won on time"]
1.e4 g6 2.Ke2 Bg7 3.Kf3 b6 4.g3 Bb7 5.d3 d6 6.Kg2 Nd7 7.f4 e6 8.Nf3 Qe7 9.Be2 h6 10.h4 g5
11.h5 gxf4 12.gxf4 e5 13.f5 Ndf6 14.Nc3 Nd7 15.Be3 Ngf6 16.Qd2 d5 17.Rag1 dxe4 18.dxe4 Nxe4 19.Nxe4 Bxe4 20.Kf1 O-O-O
21.Rxg7 Bxf5 22.Ke1 e4 23.Nd4 Be6 24.Kd1 Bxa2 25.Kc1 Nc5 26.Bg4+ Kb8 27.Rf1 Bd5 28.Qb4 Kb7 29.Qb5 a6 30.Rfxf7 Qxf7
31.Rxf7 axb5 32.Re7 b4 33.Nb5 Rc8 34.Nd6+ Kb8 35.Nxc8 Rxc8 36.Bxc8 Kxc8 37.Bxc5 Kb7 38.Rh7 bxc5 39.Rxh6 Be6 40.Rf6 Bg4
41.h6 1-0
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.11.01"]
[White "Windarcher"]
[Black "TheProNewb"]
[Result "0-1"]
[WhiteElo "1856"]
[BlackElo "2292"]
[TimeControl "1|0"]
[Termination "TheProNewb won by resignation"]
1.b3 e6 2.Bb2 Ke7 3.d3 Kd6 4.e3 c5 5.Nd2 Kc7 6.g3 Nc6 7.Bg2 d5 8.a3 Nf6 9.Ne2 Bd6 10.c4 b6
11.cxd5 exd5 12.Bxf6 Qxf6 13.Bxd5 Bb7 14.Bg2 Rad8 15.Nc4 Kb8 16.b4 cxb4 17.axb4 Bxb4+ 18.Kf1 Rxd3 19.Qa4 Bc3 20.Nxc3 Qxc3
21.Na3 Qxa1+ 22.Ke2 Qc3 23.Bxc6 Rd2+ 24.Kf3 Bxc6+ 0-1
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.11.01"]
[White "Windarcher"]
[Black "TheProNewb"]
[Result "0-1"]
[WhiteElo "1856"]
[BlackElo "2292"]
[TimeControl "1|0"]
[Termination "TheProNewb won by checkmate"]
1.b3 e6 2.Bb2 Ke7 3.g3 Kd6 4.Bg2 Kc5 5.d3 Kb4 6.e3 a5 7.Ne2 a4 8.a3+ Kb5 9.b4 c5 10.c3 d6
11.Nd2 d5 12.Qc2 Kc6 13.O-O b5 14.c4 Kb6 15.cxd5 exd5 16.e4 d4 17.e5 Ra7 18.bxc5+ Bxc5 19.Rab1 Rc7 20.Qd1 Be6
21.Nf3 Nc6 22.Nfxd4 Nxd4 23.Nxd4 Bxd4 24.Bxd4+ Qxd4 25.Re1 Bb3 26.Qd2 Ne7 27.Re4 Qc5 28.e6 f5 29.Rf4 g5 30.Rf3 Bd5
31.Re3 Bxg2 32.Kxg2 f4 33.Re2 Nf5 34.gxf4 Qd5+ 35.f3 Nd4 36.Re5 Qxf3+ 37.Kg1 Rc2 38.Qb4 Qg2# 0-1
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.11.01"]
[White "Windarcher"]
[Black "TheProNewb"]
[Result "0-1"]
[WhiteElo "1856"]
[BlackElo "2292"]
[TimeControl "1|0"]
[Termination "TheProNewb won on time"]
1.h3 d6 2.g3 Kd7 3.Bg2 Ke6 4.b3 Ke5 5.Bb2+ Kf5 6.d3 h5 7.e3 h4 8.g4+ Kg5 9.Qf3 e5 10.Qd1 Nc6
11.Ne2 d5 12.Nd2 f5 13.Ng1 Kh6 14.gxf5 g5 15.fxg6 Kxg6 16.Qe2 Nf6 17.O-O-O Bf5 18.f4 e4 19.dxe4 dxe4 20.Bxf6 Qxf6
21.Kb1 Ba3 22.c3 Qxc3 23.Nc4 Be7 24.Qc2 Qxc2+ 25.Kxc2 Rad8 26.Ne2 Bf6 27.Nd4 Nxd4+ 28.exd4 Rxd4 29.Rde1 c5 30.Ne5+ Bxe5
31.fxe5 Rhd8 32.Rhg1 Kf7 33.Bf3 Ke6 34.Be2 Kxe5 35.Bg4 Rd2+ 36.Kb1 Bxg4 37.Rxg4 R8d4 38.Rg5+ Kd6 39.Rg4 Kc6 40.Rxh4 Kb5
0-1
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.11.01"]
[White "TheProNewb"]
[Black "Windarcher"]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteElo "2292"]
[BlackElo "1856"]
[TimeControl "1|0"]
[Termination "TheProNewb won by resignation"]
1.d3 b6 2.Kd2 Bb7 3.Ke3 g6 4.Kd4 Bg7+ 5.Kc4 e6 6.Kb3 d6 7.c4 Nd7 8.Nc3 Ne7 9.e4 a5 10.Be3 Ba6
11.Ka4 Qb8 12.f4 c6 13.Nf3 b5+ 14.cxb5 Bxb5+ 15.Ka3 Bxc3 16.bxc3 Nc5 17.Rb1 Na6 18.c4 Qc7 19.cxb5 cxb5 20.Qc1 b4+
21.Kb2 Qb6 22.Bxb6 1-0
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.11.01"]
[White "Windarcher"]
[Black "TheProNewb"]
[Result "0-1"]
[WhiteElo "1856"]
[BlackElo "2292"]
[TimeControl "1|0"]
[Termination "TheProNewb won by resignation"]
1.g3 e6 2.Bg2 Ke7 3.b3 Kd6 4.Bb2 Kc5 5.d3 Kb4 6.e3 a5 7.Qd2+ Kb5 8.Ne2 a4 9.Qc3 a3 10.Qc4+ Kb6
11.Qb4+ Bxb4+ 0-1
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.11.01"]
[White "TheProNewb"]
[Black "Windarcher"]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteElo "2292"]
[BlackElo "1856"]
[TimeControl "1|0"]
[Termination "TheProNewb won by resignation"]
1.d4 b6 2.Kd2 Bb7 3.Kd3 g6 4.e4 Bg7 5.Nc3 d5 6.e5 f6 7.f4 fxe5 8.Nf3 exf4 9.Bxf4 e6 10.Qd2 Nc6
11.Bg5 Qd7 12.Qf4 Nge7 13.Re1 O-O-O 14.h4 Rdf8 15.Qg4 h6 16.Bf4 Nb4+ 17.Kd2 Nxa2 18.Nxa2 Qa4 19.Nc3 Bxd4 20.Nxa4
1-0
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.11.01"]
[White "Windarcher"]
[Black "TheProNewb"]
[Result "0-1"]
[WhiteElo "1856"]
[BlackElo "2292"]
[TimeControl "1|0"]
[Termination "TheProNewb won by resignation"]
1.g3 f6 2.Bg2 Kf7 3.b3 Kg6 4.Bb2 Kh5 5.h4 Kg4 6.e3+ Kf5 7.Bh3+ Kg6 8.h5+ Kf7 9.h6 g6 10.d3 Nxh6
11.Nd2 Ng8 12.g4 Bg7 13.Qb1 d5 14.g5 f5 15.f4 e5 16.fxe5 Be6 17.d4 c5 18.Ne2 Nc6 19.Nf3 b5 20.Qd1 c4
21.Qd2 Qd7 22.Qc3 b4 23.Qd2 c3 24.Qc1 a5 25.Qd1 Nge7 26.Rb1 cxb2 27.Rxb2 Rhb8 0-1
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.11.01"]
[White "TheProNewb"]
[Black "Windarcher"]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteElo "2292"]
[BlackElo "1856"]
[TimeControl "1|0"]
[Termination "TheProNewb won on time"]
1.e4 g6 2.Ke2 Bg7 3.Kf3 b6 4.g3 Bb7 5.d3 d6 6.Kg2 Nd7 7.f4 e6 8.Nf3 Qe7 9.Be2 h6 10.h4 g5
11.h5 gxf4 12.gxf4 e5 13.f5 Ndf6 14.Nc3 Nd7 15.Be3 Ngf6 16.Qd2 d5 17.Rag1 dxe4 18.dxe4 Nxe4 19.Nxe4 Bxe4 20.Kf1 O-O-O
21.Rxg7 Bxf5 22.Ke1 e4 23.Nd4 Be6 24.Kd1 Bxa2 25.Kc1 Nc5 26.Bg4+ Kb8 27.Rf1 Bd5 28.Qb4 Kb7 29.Qb5 a6 30.Rfxf7 Qxf7
31.Rxf7 axb5 32.Re7 b4 33.Nb5 Rc8 34.Nd6+ Kb8 35.Nxc8 Rxc8 36.Bxc8 Kxc8 37.Bxc5 Kb7 38.Rh7 bxc5 39.Rxh6 Be6 40.Rf6 Bg4
41.h6 1-0
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.11.01"]
[White "Windarcher"]
[Black "TheProNewb"]
[Result "0-1"]
[WhiteElo "1856"]
[BlackElo "2292"]
[TimeControl "1|0"]
[Termination "TheProNewb won by resignation"]
1.b3 e6 2.Bb2 Ke7 3.d3 Kd6 4.e3 c5 5.Nd2 Kc7 6.g3 Nc6 7.Bg2 d5 8.a3 Nf6 9.Ne2 Bd6 10.c4 b6
11.cxd5 exd5 12.Bxf6 Qxf6 13.Bxd5 Bb7 14.Bg2 Rad8 15.Nc4 Kb8 16.b4 cxb4 17.axb4 Bxb4+ 18.Kf1 Rxd3 19.Qa4 Bc3 20.Nxc3 Qxc3
21.Na3 Qxa1+ 22.Ke2 Qc3 23.Bxc6 Rd2+ 24.Kf3 Bxc6+ 0-1
Friday, October 22, 2010
Thursday, October 21, 2010
RJT Chess
RJT Chess is a relatively new variant of chinese chess (yes really, it only started this year). It is an immensely tactical and mindboggling puzzle suited for the mentally prepared, and is definitely not a game for people who do not like to think.
Random advertisement!:
"d/th" -- bet you can't solve the riddle
First of all, the rules of RJT Chess. In RJT Chess, pieces move as in Chinese Chess. It is not difficult to find out the rules of Chinese Chess on your own, and as such I save words. However, there is one key variation (and 1 more sneaky unimportant looking tweak to the rule) that changes the gameplay totally: the fact that captures are not allowed.
The aim of the game remains: to checkmate the opposing general. No collateral damage. No mass murder of civilians and troops alike. No bloodshed. Only a forced dignified resignation when one general realises that the end of the road is inevitable.
Hence, the game is all about strategic blocking of pieces.
First, let us ignore the second changed rule and proceed straight into the game, for the seemingly mysterious rule will be clearly explained by the nature of the game.
The idea is to stick a piece into the opponent general's face, no matter how poorly it is defended and how well it is attacked, for it cannot be captured anyway. For example, two chariots will nearly always kill the king should it get sufficiently close.
Hence, much of the resulting strategy revolves blocking the enemy pieces from swarming your king and even from crossing the river (just because it can be done). What does this naturally lead to? A disastrous blockade by the river which neither side can bypass. This naturally leads to a position where no checks can be made (since no pieces are sufficiently close to the king to even threaten to give check), and hence the game ends up in a draw. This is clearly not fun, and leads us into the rationale for the second rule.
Rule 2 (Check Existence Rule): From any given position (not halfway through a move, naturally), if side A cannot give check assuming side A is given an infinite number of moves in a row (ie. without side B moving), then side A wins. This rule prevents people from setting blockades around their kings, whether direct, or by barricading the river with buckywalls.
Naturally, what results is a NEARLY blocked up position, through which flies can barely pass through, and a very very tedious game (although it is easy to blunder into the Check Existence Rule, especially when the opponent moves into a position where he suddenly cannot make any more checks (eg. moving his knight into an enclosure of 4 "hostile" pieces).
Furthermore, there are no draws in this game so far except by agreement, and by having extremely convoluted positions unlikely to happen in-game. This is unnatural; drawing is a peaceful resolution, a compromise, a sign of civility and education and moral standards.
Hence, a new set of variant rules were added to firstly speed up the game (which took 40 minutes in a match of 2 relatively careful people -- and they were moving relatively quickly, at least at the start), and to implement forced draws, which are otherwise hard to prove due to the large number of variations with all 16 pieces on the board.
There are 3 important rules in the variant:
1) Perpetual check is a draw (a little desperate here =P)
P.S. Stalemate is not a draw -- coming to that later
2) In the unlikely event that the Check Existence Rule is flouted by both players at once, it is a happy peaceful draw.
3) Bings, the main barricading resource, now has a new move. When 2 bings meet head on, any player may command his bing to displace the "hostile" (still like that word) bing, and the two bings swap positions.
This blog will focus mainly on the variant, which has more spice and more fun stuff to write on. Don't read on...
Random advertisement!:
"d/th" -- bet you can't solve the riddle
First of all, the rules of RJT Chess. In RJT Chess, pieces move as in Chinese Chess. It is not difficult to find out the rules of Chinese Chess on your own, and as such I save words. However, there is one key variation (and 1 more sneaky unimportant looking tweak to the rule) that changes the gameplay totally: the fact that captures are not allowed.
The aim of the game remains: to checkmate the opposing general. No collateral damage. No mass murder of civilians and troops alike. No bloodshed. Only a forced dignified resignation when one general realises that the end of the road is inevitable.
Hence, the game is all about strategic blocking of pieces.
First, let us ignore the second changed rule and proceed straight into the game, for the seemingly mysterious rule will be clearly explained by the nature of the game.
The idea is to stick a piece into the opponent general's face, no matter how poorly it is defended and how well it is attacked, for it cannot be captured anyway. For example, two chariots will nearly always kill the king should it get sufficiently close.
Hence, much of the resulting strategy revolves blocking the enemy pieces from swarming your king and even from crossing the river (just because it can be done). What does this naturally lead to? A disastrous blockade by the river which neither side can bypass. This naturally leads to a position where no checks can be made (since no pieces are sufficiently close to the king to even threaten to give check), and hence the game ends up in a draw. This is clearly not fun, and leads us into the rationale for the second rule.
Rule 2 (Check Existence Rule): From any given position (not halfway through a move, naturally), if side A cannot give check assuming side A is given an infinite number of moves in a row (ie. without side B moving), then side A wins. This rule prevents people from setting blockades around their kings, whether direct, or by barricading the river with buckywalls.
Naturally, what results is a NEARLY blocked up position, through which flies can barely pass through, and a very very tedious game (although it is easy to blunder into the Check Existence Rule, especially when the opponent moves into a position where he suddenly cannot make any more checks (eg. moving his knight into an enclosure of 4 "hostile" pieces).
Furthermore, there are no draws in this game so far except by agreement, and by having extremely convoluted positions unlikely to happen in-game. This is unnatural; drawing is a peaceful resolution, a compromise, a sign of civility and education and moral standards.
Hence, a new set of variant rules were added to firstly speed up the game (which took 40 minutes in a match of 2 relatively careful people -- and they were moving relatively quickly, at least at the start), and to implement forced draws, which are otherwise hard to prove due to the large number of variations with all 16 pieces on the board.
There are 3 important rules in the variant:
1) Perpetual check is a draw (a little desperate here =P)
P.S. Stalemate is not a draw -- coming to that later
2) In the unlikely event that the Check Existence Rule is flouted by both players at once, it is a happy peaceful draw.
3) Bings, the main barricading resource, now has a new move. When 2 bings meet head on, any player may command his bing to displace the "hostile" (still like that word) bing, and the two bings swap positions.
This blog will focus mainly on the variant, which has more spice and more fun stuff to write on. Don't read on...
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Friday, October 15, 2010
Friday, October 8, 2010
Analysis of an ongoing chess match!
Match between "progressquest" and "openingmaster".
Seriously, don't trust my names.
1. H2+3 p7+1 2. P7+1 h8+7 3. H8+7 c2.5
4. H7+6 h2+1
At this point, I screamed win. (C8+5!!!)
This wins a piece, but at what cost?
5. C8+5! c5+4!!
The last move murkies waters, since suddenly black has a K.T.P. (kong tou pao).
However, black is still down a piece, and is probably theorectically losing.
6. C8.2 c5-1 7. C+.9 r1+2 8. H6+7 r1.3 9. P7+1 e3+5 10. C2+5 r9.8
These moves were played out relatively quickly. Black was now 1 minute down (8 to 9)
Red is trying to exchange pieces of the board (a good strategy when up in material).
11. R1.2 r3-1
R3-1 is a mysterious move. I'm still trying to figure.
12. H7+9 r3+3
13. R9.8 h7+6
In my opinion, black is winning now.
14. C2-2 h6+7 15. C2.7 e5+3
A series of strange moves. Black is lost. The rest of the match is provided for your enjoyment.
16. R2+9 h7+5 17. A6+5 h5-6 18. H3+5 h6+8 19. H9+7 Resign
Yay! Another match!
1. C8.5 h2+3 2. P7+1 p7+1 3. R9+1 h8+7
4. R9.6 a6+5 5. C2.3 h7+6 6. R6+7 c8-1
Non-spectacular opening. Probably not main lines, but this kind of stuff can't go wrong. Except black nearly lost a zhu. Not tolerated.
7. R6-2 h6-4 8. C3+3
And now the zhu is lost. Who cares about the won che/ju/chariot/whatever I called it before.
8... h4+3 9. H8+7 e7+5 10. H7+6 e5+7
The match evens; the plot thickens...
11. H6+5 c8.7 12. H5+7 r9.8 13. A6+5 e7-5
This is about even. Black should probably pin the horse on file 2 and then go for an attack quickly. Black has his fair share of threats.
14. H2+1 r1+1 15. H7-5 c2+7 16. E7+9 h3+2
Black IS going for the kill here... with another cheapoe... bzz
17. R1.2 h2+3 18. A5-6 h3-4 19. K5+1 r8+9 20. H1-2
Totally blunderous.
Firstly, R1=2 is a blunder due to R8+9. If the ma recaptures, the pao takes the qiang and mates :) *evil sadistic grin*
H2+3 is hence a "blunder", since it doesn't get the free che/ju/chariot.
c2.6 21. H5+7 r1.2 22. Timeout
Ah well. The position was winning for black anyway.
Ok. That's it.
Pardon me for the sanity of analysis. Arrivederci.
Seriously, don't trust my names.
1. H2+3 p7+1 2. P7+1 h8+7 3. H8+7 c2.5
4. H7+6 h2+1
At this point, I screamed win. (C8+5!!!)
This wins a piece, but at what cost?
5. C8+5! c5+4!!
The last move murkies waters, since suddenly black has a K.T.P. (kong tou pao).
However, black is still down a piece, and is probably theorectically losing.
6. C8.2 c5-1 7. C+.9 r1+2 8. H6+7 r1.3 9. P7+1 e3+5 10. C2+5 r9.8
These moves were played out relatively quickly. Black was now 1 minute down (8 to 9)
Red is trying to exchange pieces of the board (a good strategy when up in material).
11. R1.2 r3-1
R3-1 is a mysterious move. I'm still trying to figure.
12. H7+9 r3+3
13. R9.8 h7+6
In my opinion, black is winning now.
14. C2-2 h6+7 15. C2.7 e5+3
A series of strange moves. Black is lost. The rest of the match is provided for your enjoyment.
16. R2+9 h7+5 17. A6+5 h5-6 18. H3+5 h6+8 19. H9+7 Resign
Yay! Another match!
1. C8.5 h2+3 2. P7+1 p7+1 3. R9+1 h8+7
4. R9.6 a6+5 5. C2.3 h7+6 6. R6+7 c8-1
Non-spectacular opening. Probably not main lines, but this kind of stuff can't go wrong. Except black nearly lost a zhu. Not tolerated.
7. R6-2 h6-4 8. C3+3
And now the zhu is lost. Who cares about the won che/ju/chariot/whatever I called it before.
8... h4+3 9. H8+7 e7+5 10. H7+6 e5+7
The match evens; the plot thickens...
11. H6+5 c8.7 12. H5+7 r9.8 13. A6+5 e7-5
This is about even. Black should probably pin the horse on file 2 and then go for an attack quickly. Black has his fair share of threats.
14. H2+1 r1+1 15. H7-5 c2+7 16. E7+9 h3+2
Black IS going for the kill here... with another cheapoe... bzz
17. R1.2 h2+3 18. A5-6 h3-4 19. K5+1 r8+9 20. H1-2
Totally blunderous.
Firstly, R1=2 is a blunder due to R8+9. If the ma recaptures, the pao takes the qiang and mates :) *evil sadistic grin*
H2+3 is hence a "blunder", since it doesn't get the free che/ju/chariot.
c2.6 21. H5+7 r1.2 22. Timeout
Ah well. The position was winning for black anyway.
Ok. That's it.
Pardon me for the sanity of analysis. Arrivederci.
Blunders!
I played a match against myself... and upon mild analysis, discovered about 5 blunders. Enjoy laughing at me.
FORMAT WXF
RED ~50142 ; 0 ;;
BLACK ~50141 ; 0 ;;
RESULT 1-0
DATE 2010-10-08 18:06:15
EVENT KGP Game ; 10m+0s
START{
1. C2.5 c8.5 2. H2+3 h8+7 3. R1.2 r9+1
4. R2+4 r9.4 5. H8+7 h2+3 6. P7+1 p7+1
7. R9+1 r4+5 8. R2.6 r4.3 9. H7-5 r1+1
10. R9.6 r1.6 11. C8+4 r3.2 12. C8.5 h7+5
13. C5+4 a6+5 14. C5-2 h3+5 15. R++2 k5.6
16. R+.5 r2.5 17. R6+2 r5.4 18. H5+6 r6+5
19. H6+5 r6.7 20. R5.4 a5+6 21. C5+3 e7+5
22. R4-4 r7.5 23. R4.5 r5+1 24. E7+5 }END
FORMAT WXF
RED ~50142 ; 0 ;;
BLACK ~50141 ; 0 ;;
RESULT 1-0
DATE 2010-10-08 18:06:15
EVENT KGP Game ; 10m+0s
START{
1. C2.5 c8.5 2. H2+3 h8+7 3. R1.2 r9+1
4. R2+4 r9.4 5. H8+7 h2+3 6. P7+1 p7+1
7. R9+1 r4+5 8. R2.6 r4.3 9. H7-5 r1+1
10. R9.6 r1.6 11. C8+4 r3.2 12. C8.5 h7+5
13. C5+4 a6+5 14. C5-2 h3+5 15. R++2 k5.6
16. R+.5 r2.5 17. R6+2 r5.4 18. H5+6 r6+5
19. H6+5 r6.7 20. R5.4 a5+6 21. C5+3 e7+5
22. R4-4 r7.5 23. R4.5 r5+1 24. E7+5 }END
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Tao Te Ching Quote
"Nothing in the world is weaker or more yielding than water.
Yet nothing is equal in wearing away at the hard and strong.
There is nothing quite like it.
Thus, the weak can overcome the strong; the soft can overcome the hard.
Everyone in the world understands this yet no one puts it into practice.
Thus, the master says, "Only he who takes upon himself the pain of the people is fit to rule them. He who takes upon himself the sins of the world is king of the universe."
The truth often sounds like a paradox."
Translated from Tao Te Ching, Chapter 78 by Steven R. Cunningham.
Yet nothing is equal in wearing away at the hard and strong.
There is nothing quite like it.
Thus, the weak can overcome the strong; the soft can overcome the hard.
Everyone in the world understands this yet no one puts it into practice.
Thus, the master says, "Only he who takes upon himself the pain of the people is fit to rule them. He who takes upon himself the sins of the world is king of the universe."
The truth often sounds like a paradox."
Translated from Tao Te Ching, Chapter 78 by Steven R. Cunningham.
Funny Quotes of Yale Professor Shankar
"There's not that much material that I can teach you, actually. I can write all the physics equations in one corner of the blackboard, and then all you need is an IQ of 5000 and you're set!"
"Relativity and quantum didn't use to be taught in this class, which is a shame, because they are two of the sexiest topics in all of physics"
"You can add vectors, multiply a vector by a number, flip vectors - the fun is just endless"
"In this first problem, there is a car driving along a cliff, and the car just jumps off. This person has decided to end it all. Now, we want to know at what time the car hits the ground. This is the beauty of physics, because if this were a psychology class we'd want to know why the person was jumping, but we are simply concerned with how long it takes."
"Say you're firing a rocket launcher. What angle should you fire it at for maximum range? Say you fire it straight up. The good news is that it's going to be up in the air for a very long time. The bad news is that it's going to land on your head"
"You'll catch me making mistakes sometimes- I don't mind when my students do that. But not this time"
"This problem in your book says that a physicist is hiking up the Alps. You know that's a joke, right?"
"Let's say the physicist gets stuck while climbing, and you want to send him something. It may be food, or since it's a physicist, he might say 'Send me my Wolfson and Pasachoff (our textbook)! I haven't read it in two days!'"
"This is a very important day. You can forget your birthday, forget anniversaries, but you need to remember this day, because this is the day that you will learn Newton's Laws"
"That's the beauty of teaching- for 1 hour of the day you don't feel like a complete idiot because you realize that there are many people worse off than you"
"See, one reason why the Americans fought the British is because they couldn't stand their units. You know they have something called a slug? I mean, what is a slug? I don't know, and I'm proud of it!"
"Say you're in an elevator. I could do two things to you and you wouldn't know the difference. I could pull the elevator up with a rope and you'd begin to feel heavy. Or, I could replace the planet beneath you with a bigger planet and you'd feel heavy. Now most likely I'll do the first one. But you can't tell the difference!"
"People think that when you're weightless, you've escaped the pull of gravity. But when the elevator that you're in slams into the floor, then you'll know that you were wrong."
"So today we will do the problem that makes most people never want to do physics again"
"So the normal force is pointing down, gravity is pointing down, and here is where panic sets in"
"Has everyone in here seen an integral? Good. Because I didn't have a backup plan"
"I was teaching a class over the summer, and a student began to get very agitated when I did partial derivatives. He was saying that those weren't a prerequisite for the class, so I shouldn't be teaching them. So I said to him 'you know, the thing about coming to class is- you actually might learn something!'"
"When you draw a box around something, you know it's time to get serious"
"What I see is, the mathematicians tell us what the rules are, and then it's our job to break them"
"You could write a law and think it's correct, and then you'd publish a bunch of papers, and eventually you'd realize that your parents are the only ones reading them and then you'd know that you were wrong. Now, on the other hand, if your friends are reading your papers, your enemies are reading your papers, and then your enemies are stealing what you've written in your papers, then you'll know that your law is correct"
"I've gotta be nice to my students, because one day one of you could be my physician. I could be lying flat on my back, and you could be coming up to me with a mask on and a knife in your hand. I'd say 'What about my anesthesia?' and you'd say 'What about that formula sheet you promised me?', so that's why I try to treat you guys nicely"
"So Newton said 'I will go invent integral calculus.' After all, he just invented differential calculus the other day, so why shouldn't he?"
"When you're doing problems on the blackboard your intelligence is proportional to your distance from the board, so now I'm at an all time low"
"At the end, I want to make sure that you all understand this. No child will be left behind"
"The thing is, nature doesn't care whether you like something or not - you just have to suck it up"
"The question you have to ask yourself is, if your professor drops dead in the middle of his lecture, will you be able to finish deriving the equation he started? If so, then you know you're doing okay"
"Event number 1: I invent the gun."
*makes gun with fingers and points it at head*
"Event number 2: I blow my brains out. I was going to point the gun at one of you guys but I didn't want any problems"
*writes something on board*
"NO! Don't write that down! Bad!!!"
"Many people think that, since they're going to be doctors or something, they're never going to need to know about relativity. Well what if one of your patients starts running away from you at the speed of light? Then you really need to know this"
"Today we are going to talk about rigid bodies. Like Al Gore."
"If we throw a cat up in the air it will be moving its arms and legs all around, and that's not rigid. We want a rigid body, like a dead cat"
"If you look at all the doors at Yale you will notice that the doorknobs are on the opposite side as the hinges, so you get the most action with the least amount of force. Now if you go to Moronland, the doorknobs are all close to the hinges and you can never get anything accomplished"
(after drawing his “ballerina” on the chalkboard, which I have attempted to recreate here)
“I guess it’s better to try and fail than not to try at all”
“This is the address that I got this email from: aaa.bbb. So dear aaa, if I can call you by your first name”
*pauses*
“Yes, I’ve reached the point in my life when I don’t care what people think about me”
“If I could tag the air molecules – this is Joe, Joe, what are you doing? Generally, Joe is just going back and forth”
“The Earth’s whole mass – you, me, China – everything is pulling it down”
“Did you guys watch the NOVA program last night? No, you were watching Joe Millionaire. Well, I watched the NOVA program”
“Let’s say a bunch of guys are chasing you and they fire a bunch of bullets at you, and then another group of guys runs towards you from the front and they fire a bunch of bullets at you. Now, by in large, your life’s about to get worse. Now if they were firing sound waves at you, this wouldn’t be the case.”
“Never trust a log plot. And especially never trust a log log plot”
“If you miss class you should talk to someone, because I don’t go straight from the book. If you read the whole book you run the risk of learning something you don’t need to know. And who wants to do that?”
(talking about how railroad track engineers added gaps in the tracks to account for thermal expansion)
“If you go look at railroad tracks now, they don’t have these gaps anymore. I don’t know what the hell is going on with that. I guess I could go on the internet and find out, but it doesn’t make sense to me. Metal doesn’t bend anymore?”
“You can talk to Martians, talk to The Planet of the Apes, tell the apes to gather some gas in a jar, and say ‘Hey apes! When PV=0 then T=-273!’”
“But if you’re from Harvard, you think the center of the universe is here, in Cambridge”
“Come on now, make big diagrams! If you want to save trees, do it on your own time – not in my course!”
“I’ve found specific heats for objects in my house when I forget where I left them and then smell them burning. I’ve even found the melting points of some of these objects!”
“The whole point of the War of Independence was so that we don’t have to use BTUs anymore. So why are we still doing it??”
“What are two colors you combine to make another? Green and red make yellow?”
“You could be heating any object. If you are heating an elephant, m is the mass of the elephant, t is the temperature of the elephant, and c is the specific heat of the elephant.”
“If you put your hand on a hot plate, you should say ‘Wow, these molecules are fast!’. That’s what I want you to say from now on, not ‘Ouch!!””
(Shankar “quoting” Carnot)
“No engine can beat my engine”
“Having defined entropy, I’m now going to show you the mega second law”
“You may be questioned by the Mafia someday. And it’s standard practice for them to lower you down in this tank of water. So when you’re pushing out on the walls, trying to save yourself, think to yourself – how many Newtons am I applying to this wall? – because you’re causing pressure!”
“There are some congressmen who have physics degrees, so you can’t bullshit them. You can come up to them and say ‘Hey Congressmen!’ and throw torques at them, and fluids and relativity, and they’re not gonna care. They’re just gonna laugh in your face”
Shankar: “Any suggestions on how to make up for the missed class?”
Student: “Put the lecture online?”
Shankar: “How can I convey the full force of my personality online?”
“If you don’t try to beat the 4 pi now, you’ll have to beat it later. You have to make a choice.”
“Now if you rub this rod on your cat, or dog, or cow, or buffalo…”
*messes up demonstration*
“You know, some of us go into theoretical physics for a very good reason”
“You can also draw a mega sphere that will surround both of them”
“All we need to solve this problem is Gauss’s Law and several large hand-waving arguments”
(definitely college physics…does this sound wrong to anyone else?)
“If you’re a vector and you really wanna produce a number, you’ve gotta have a dot product with somebody”
(just before leaving on a 10 day trip)
“See you suckers! I’m going where the sun is shining and it’s 75 degrees all day!!! Bye!”
“I’m gonna go home and pick a day for the midterm, and you’ve gotta let me know if this is a problem. So if you’re getting married that day, bring in your spouse-to-be, and if you’re gonna have a heart transplant, I wanna see the new heart”
“It may relieve you to know that there’s only a finite charge, but there’s still high voltage. That’s why there are all those labels saying ‘Don’t swallow this computer’”
“No, not strings, strings are chapter 9600 of this course”
“There was an event in which someone claimed that they saw a monopole, but that happened somewhere in California, so we don’t know what to think about that”
“Now that is the magic thing that tells us everything”
“If you are a complete moron, you will take your wire all the way, but as the limit of moron is infinite, you will have wasted all your wire on a loop of zero area”
“I just love this problem, because it has no numbers! I mean, here’s mu, here’s B, and everybody’s happy!”
*draws loop in two planes*
“Okay, here is your Valentine’s Day loop”
“The attraction due to the wires is just one big orgy of cross products”
“If you want electricity in your house, just build your house on a big loop and get somebody to drag your house along”
“Why is Lenz’s Law looking so difficult? Because of the way I taught it!”
“’I’ could be anything. It could be current, it could be the GNP of some country, whatever – we don’t care”
“That’s why I’m telling you all to go do physics for the rest of your lives. It’s fun, and if you’re lucky, you might actually get paid!”
“If you’re a lawyer who can do percolation equations, you’ll be the lawyer who can’t be beat – you can have your own tv show”
“Plus, since you’re coming out of Yale, barring a few particular exceptions, you can speak good English and do a good service leading this country”
“There is one congressman who knows physics, and he’s just bullying everybody around, because when he writes an equation down, none of the rest of them know what to do!”
“Now I’m going to do the mother of all circuits”
“When you open this switch you gotta close the second one immediately so that it can vent all its frustration into this guy”
“There are some things you can always look up, like your social security number or your birthday, but the trig identities you gotta know”
“Who knows complex numbers? You don’t know complex numbers? Well how do you do your taxes?”
“You just gotta suck it up, okay – complex numbers are here to stay, they rule the world…once you get to know them your relationship will go from hate to love very fast”
“In E&M it’s harder because you can’t see or feel magnetic fields, unless you’re a duck. I’m told that when they’re flying north they follow the earth’s magnetic field to the pole. I was quite impressed with the ducks – they don’t even have to solve Maxwell’s equations to follow the field, and yet I get lost in Manhattan!”
“I know most days after 50 minutes you guys go into little convulsions and send me not so subtle hints that time is up – but not this day”
“And that was the big, all-time, physics aha! Moment”
“And this equals this, and that is also wrong”
“Yes, you will find that you have three or four hands, and many organs on top of your head…but I think going to a Sting concert is more dangerous to your health”
“If you’re running next to a truck at the same speed, you are not a truck!!!”
“If you’re talking at a really high frequency, the guy around the corner won’t hear you, but you had better be talking to your dog, because someone right in front of you won’t hear you either”
“If you have a question, call me, because I don’t answer email. I come from a generation where it is impossible for me to sit down and figure out where all these letters are. Why did they have to scramble them all up?? I’ve seen my kids in this catatonic state in front of the computer, doing instant messaging, but I just can’t do it. So if you emailed me a long question about the meaning of life and I didn’t respond, don’t worry. I know the meaning of life, okay – just call me.”
“Say you are at the bottom of this pool of water. I don’t know how you got there – maybe you missed a loan payment or something”
*draws a small diagram*
“This is how I get my revenge on you guys. I don’t know where you learned that homework should only take two sheets of paper, but I’ve seen you guys pack in superstrings and everything in just a little space”
“You have 4 times 3 divided by 2 combinations of rays you can draw, so that is what?…um, some number of choices”
“When I was a student I used to just draw two rays and be done with it, but now that I am nearing retirement I am so excited to draw all these different rays and see that they all hit the same spot. You guys don’t know how much pleasure this gives me”
“It’s okay if you don’t get it, because if you all do get it then I’m out of a job. I rely on you guys not getting it.”
“It’s a good thing that I made this mistake, because it shows you that even if you can’t solve this equation you can still get a job at Yale. And, if you are beating yourself up over the midterm, my embarrassment should provide some comfort to you”
“We’re going to go over this again, as part of our No Child Left Behind program. Some children were left behind Wednesday, I know, because I saw lots of puzzled faces”
*draws a diagram that takes up a quarter of the board*
“Who was it who was asking me to draw big pictures?”
*Wynn raises hand*
“Okay, this one’s for you!”
“When you have an i on the bottom you replace it with a negative i on the top. This has been known since Biblical times- an i for an i”
“The act of observing an electron is very traumatic for that electron. Right now I’m getting hit by millions of photons. I’m taking it like a man. But for the electron, this is not the same”
“I forgot what my life was like before quantum mechanics. I know I was playing in a sandbox and someone was trying to beat me up, but I don’t remember when that was.”
*does an example, Gershkoff corrects his vocabulary*
“This also illustrates the unimportance of terminology”
“This is very different from a graduate quantum course which I could teach in my sleep and which you could listen to in your sleep. Here, everyone needs to be awake – this causes some added difficulty”
“If you live 15 billion years, then you will be able to see the back of your head”
“You might turn down your light source, but there will still be photons carrying energy that are hitting the particle. You can take a gun and weaken it so that it only shoots a few bullets a day, but if you get hit by one, you’re still dead”
“You guys didn’t get that email last night? I sent that at 11 – a good 4 hours past my bedtime!”
“These tools are invented by mathematicians for their own nefarious purposes, but they are actually very useful for us”
“Mathematicians are always ahead of physicists, and physicists are always a little bit ahead of engineers, although that difference is not always clear anymore. It’s because it takes so much time for our president to catch up with everything. He says ‘How many barrels of oil will we save by you studying quantum mechanics?’ and then we say ‘Well, zero barrels’ and he gets confused. So either you find this quantum stuff very useful or just use it to scare the hell out of everyone else”
“You can only have a state of definite momentum if you have e to the i dog x over h bar, where you have momentum equal to dog”
“Say you are a prisoner in a jail. If you are a quantum prisoner, your wavelength will be changing. So if you are a prisoner this is what I recommend to you – go back and forth banging into each wall, because there is a slight probability that if you keep doing this, you will find yourself outside of the jail. So even if you are sentenced for 100 lifetimes, it’s still worth a try.”
"Relativity and quantum didn't use to be taught in this class, which is a shame, because they are two of the sexiest topics in all of physics"
"You can add vectors, multiply a vector by a number, flip vectors - the fun is just endless"
"In this first problem, there is a car driving along a cliff, and the car just jumps off. This person has decided to end it all. Now, we want to know at what time the car hits the ground. This is the beauty of physics, because if this were a psychology class we'd want to know why the person was jumping, but we are simply concerned with how long it takes."
"Say you're firing a rocket launcher. What angle should you fire it at for maximum range? Say you fire it straight up. The good news is that it's going to be up in the air for a very long time. The bad news is that it's going to land on your head"
"You'll catch me making mistakes sometimes- I don't mind when my students do that. But not this time"
"This problem in your book says that a physicist is hiking up the Alps. You know that's a joke, right?"
"Let's say the physicist gets stuck while climbing, and you want to send him something. It may be food, or since it's a physicist, he might say 'Send me my Wolfson and Pasachoff (our textbook)! I haven't read it in two days!'"
"This is a very important day. You can forget your birthday, forget anniversaries, but you need to remember this day, because this is the day that you will learn Newton's Laws"
"That's the beauty of teaching- for 1 hour of the day you don't feel like a complete idiot because you realize that there are many people worse off than you"
"See, one reason why the Americans fought the British is because they couldn't stand their units. You know they have something called a slug? I mean, what is a slug? I don't know, and I'm proud of it!"
"Say you're in an elevator. I could do two things to you and you wouldn't know the difference. I could pull the elevator up with a rope and you'd begin to feel heavy. Or, I could replace the planet beneath you with a bigger planet and you'd feel heavy. Now most likely I'll do the first one. But you can't tell the difference!"
"People think that when you're weightless, you've escaped the pull of gravity. But when the elevator that you're in slams into the floor, then you'll know that you were wrong."
"So today we will do the problem that makes most people never want to do physics again"
"So the normal force is pointing down, gravity is pointing down, and here is where panic sets in"
"Has everyone in here seen an integral? Good. Because I didn't have a backup plan"
"I was teaching a class over the summer, and a student began to get very agitated when I did partial derivatives. He was saying that those weren't a prerequisite for the class, so I shouldn't be teaching them. So I said to him 'you know, the thing about coming to class is- you actually might learn something!'"
"When you draw a box around something, you know it's time to get serious"
"What I see is, the mathematicians tell us what the rules are, and then it's our job to break them"
"You could write a law and think it's correct, and then you'd publish a bunch of papers, and eventually you'd realize that your parents are the only ones reading them and then you'd know that you were wrong. Now, on the other hand, if your friends are reading your papers, your enemies are reading your papers, and then your enemies are stealing what you've written in your papers, then you'll know that your law is correct"
"I've gotta be nice to my students, because one day one of you could be my physician. I could be lying flat on my back, and you could be coming up to me with a mask on and a knife in your hand. I'd say 'What about my anesthesia?' and you'd say 'What about that formula sheet you promised me?', so that's why I try to treat you guys nicely"
"So Newton said 'I will go invent integral calculus.' After all, he just invented differential calculus the other day, so why shouldn't he?"
"When you're doing problems on the blackboard your intelligence is proportional to your distance from the board, so now I'm at an all time low"
"At the end, I want to make sure that you all understand this. No child will be left behind"
"The thing is, nature doesn't care whether you like something or not - you just have to suck it up"
"The question you have to ask yourself is, if your professor drops dead in the middle of his lecture, will you be able to finish deriving the equation he started? If so, then you know you're doing okay"
"Event number 1: I invent the gun."
*makes gun with fingers and points it at head*
"Event number 2: I blow my brains out. I was going to point the gun at one of you guys but I didn't want any problems"
*writes something on board*
"NO! Don't write that down! Bad!!!"
"Many people think that, since they're going to be doctors or something, they're never going to need to know about relativity. Well what if one of your patients starts running away from you at the speed of light? Then you really need to know this"
"Today we are going to talk about rigid bodies. Like Al Gore."
"If we throw a cat up in the air it will be moving its arms and legs all around, and that's not rigid. We want a rigid body, like a dead cat"
"If you look at all the doors at Yale you will notice that the doorknobs are on the opposite side as the hinges, so you get the most action with the least amount of force. Now if you go to Moronland, the doorknobs are all close to the hinges and you can never get anything accomplished"
(after drawing his “ballerina” on the chalkboard, which I have attempted to recreate here)
“I guess it’s better to try and fail than not to try at all”
“This is the address that I got this email from: aaa.bbb. So dear aaa, if I can call you by your first name”
*pauses*
“Yes, I’ve reached the point in my life when I don’t care what people think about me”
“If I could tag the air molecules – this is Joe, Joe, what are you doing? Generally, Joe is just going back and forth”
“The Earth’s whole mass – you, me, China – everything is pulling it down”
“Did you guys watch the NOVA program last night? No, you were watching Joe Millionaire. Well, I watched the NOVA program”
“Let’s say a bunch of guys are chasing you and they fire a bunch of bullets at you, and then another group of guys runs towards you from the front and they fire a bunch of bullets at you. Now, by in large, your life’s about to get worse. Now if they were firing sound waves at you, this wouldn’t be the case.”
“Never trust a log plot. And especially never trust a log log plot”
“If you miss class you should talk to someone, because I don’t go straight from the book. If you read the whole book you run the risk of learning something you don’t need to know. And who wants to do that?”
(talking about how railroad track engineers added gaps in the tracks to account for thermal expansion)
“If you go look at railroad tracks now, they don’t have these gaps anymore. I don’t know what the hell is going on with that. I guess I could go on the internet and find out, but it doesn’t make sense to me. Metal doesn’t bend anymore?”
“You can talk to Martians, talk to The Planet of the Apes, tell the apes to gather some gas in a jar, and say ‘Hey apes! When PV=0 then T=-273!’”
“But if you’re from Harvard, you think the center of the universe is here, in Cambridge”
“Come on now, make big diagrams! If you want to save trees, do it on your own time – not in my course!”
“I’ve found specific heats for objects in my house when I forget where I left them and then smell them burning. I’ve even found the melting points of some of these objects!”
“The whole point of the War of Independence was so that we don’t have to use BTUs anymore. So why are we still doing it??”
“What are two colors you combine to make another? Green and red make yellow?”
“You could be heating any object. If you are heating an elephant, m is the mass of the elephant, t is the temperature of the elephant, and c is the specific heat of the elephant.”
“If you put your hand on a hot plate, you should say ‘Wow, these molecules are fast!’. That’s what I want you to say from now on, not ‘Ouch!!””
(Shankar “quoting” Carnot)
“No engine can beat my engine”
“Having defined entropy, I’m now going to show you the mega second law”
“You may be questioned by the Mafia someday. And it’s standard practice for them to lower you down in this tank of water. So when you’re pushing out on the walls, trying to save yourself, think to yourself – how many Newtons am I applying to this wall? – because you’re causing pressure!”
“There are some congressmen who have physics degrees, so you can’t bullshit them. You can come up to them and say ‘Hey Congressmen!’ and throw torques at them, and fluids and relativity, and they’re not gonna care. They’re just gonna laugh in your face”
Shankar: “Any suggestions on how to make up for the missed class?”
Student: “Put the lecture online?”
Shankar: “How can I convey the full force of my personality online?”
“If you don’t try to beat the 4 pi now, you’ll have to beat it later. You have to make a choice.”
“Now if you rub this rod on your cat, or dog, or cow, or buffalo…”
*messes up demonstration*
“You know, some of us go into theoretical physics for a very good reason”
“You can also draw a mega sphere that will surround both of them”
“All we need to solve this problem is Gauss’s Law and several large hand-waving arguments”
(definitely college physics…does this sound wrong to anyone else?)
“If you’re a vector and you really wanna produce a number, you’ve gotta have a dot product with somebody”
(just before leaving on a 10 day trip)
“See you suckers! I’m going where the sun is shining and it’s 75 degrees all day!!! Bye!”
“I’m gonna go home and pick a day for the midterm, and you’ve gotta let me know if this is a problem. So if you’re getting married that day, bring in your spouse-to-be, and if you’re gonna have a heart transplant, I wanna see the new heart”
“It may relieve you to know that there’s only a finite charge, but there’s still high voltage. That’s why there are all those labels saying ‘Don’t swallow this computer’”
“No, not strings, strings are chapter 9600 of this course”
“There was an event in which someone claimed that they saw a monopole, but that happened somewhere in California, so we don’t know what to think about that”
“Now that is the magic thing that tells us everything”
“If you are a complete moron, you will take your wire all the way, but as the limit of moron is infinite, you will have wasted all your wire on a loop of zero area”
“I just love this problem, because it has no numbers! I mean, here’s mu, here’s B, and everybody’s happy!”
*draws loop in two planes*
“Okay, here is your Valentine’s Day loop”
“The attraction due to the wires is just one big orgy of cross products”
“If you want electricity in your house, just build your house on a big loop and get somebody to drag your house along”
“Why is Lenz’s Law looking so difficult? Because of the way I taught it!”
“’I’ could be anything. It could be current, it could be the GNP of some country, whatever – we don’t care”
“That’s why I’m telling you all to go do physics for the rest of your lives. It’s fun, and if you’re lucky, you might actually get paid!”
“If you’re a lawyer who can do percolation equations, you’ll be the lawyer who can’t be beat – you can have your own tv show”
“Plus, since you’re coming out of Yale, barring a few particular exceptions, you can speak good English and do a good service leading this country”
“There is one congressman who knows physics, and he’s just bullying everybody around, because when he writes an equation down, none of the rest of them know what to do!”
“Now I’m going to do the mother of all circuits”
“When you open this switch you gotta close the second one immediately so that it can vent all its frustration into this guy”
“There are some things you can always look up, like your social security number or your birthday, but the trig identities you gotta know”
“Who knows complex numbers? You don’t know complex numbers? Well how do you do your taxes?”
“You just gotta suck it up, okay – complex numbers are here to stay, they rule the world…once you get to know them your relationship will go from hate to love very fast”
“In E&M it’s harder because you can’t see or feel magnetic fields, unless you’re a duck. I’m told that when they’re flying north they follow the earth’s magnetic field to the pole. I was quite impressed with the ducks – they don’t even have to solve Maxwell’s equations to follow the field, and yet I get lost in Manhattan!”
“I know most days after 50 minutes you guys go into little convulsions and send me not so subtle hints that time is up – but not this day”
“And that was the big, all-time, physics aha! Moment”
“And this equals this, and that is also wrong”
“Yes, you will find that you have three or four hands, and many organs on top of your head…but I think going to a Sting concert is more dangerous to your health”
“If you’re running next to a truck at the same speed, you are not a truck!!!”
“If you’re talking at a really high frequency, the guy around the corner won’t hear you, but you had better be talking to your dog, because someone right in front of you won’t hear you either”
“If you have a question, call me, because I don’t answer email. I come from a generation where it is impossible for me to sit down and figure out where all these letters are. Why did they have to scramble them all up?? I’ve seen my kids in this catatonic state in front of the computer, doing instant messaging, but I just can’t do it. So if you emailed me a long question about the meaning of life and I didn’t respond, don’t worry. I know the meaning of life, okay – just call me.”
“Say you are at the bottom of this pool of water. I don’t know how you got there – maybe you missed a loan payment or something”
*draws a small diagram*
“This is how I get my revenge on you guys. I don’t know where you learned that homework should only take two sheets of paper, but I’ve seen you guys pack in superstrings and everything in just a little space”
“You have 4 times 3 divided by 2 combinations of rays you can draw, so that is what?…um, some number of choices”
“When I was a student I used to just draw two rays and be done with it, but now that I am nearing retirement I am so excited to draw all these different rays and see that they all hit the same spot. You guys don’t know how much pleasure this gives me”
“It’s okay if you don’t get it, because if you all do get it then I’m out of a job. I rely on you guys not getting it.”
“It’s a good thing that I made this mistake, because it shows you that even if you can’t solve this equation you can still get a job at Yale. And, if you are beating yourself up over the midterm, my embarrassment should provide some comfort to you”
“We’re going to go over this again, as part of our No Child Left Behind program. Some children were left behind Wednesday, I know, because I saw lots of puzzled faces”
*draws a diagram that takes up a quarter of the board*
“Who was it who was asking me to draw big pictures?”
*Wynn raises hand*
“Okay, this one’s for you!”
“When you have an i on the bottom you replace it with a negative i on the top. This has been known since Biblical times- an i for an i”
“The act of observing an electron is very traumatic for that electron. Right now I’m getting hit by millions of photons. I’m taking it like a man. But for the electron, this is not the same”
“I forgot what my life was like before quantum mechanics. I know I was playing in a sandbox and someone was trying to beat me up, but I don’t remember when that was.”
*does an example, Gershkoff corrects his vocabulary*
“This also illustrates the unimportance of terminology”
“This is very different from a graduate quantum course which I could teach in my sleep and which you could listen to in your sleep. Here, everyone needs to be awake – this causes some added difficulty”
“If you live 15 billion years, then you will be able to see the back of your head”
“You might turn down your light source, but there will still be photons carrying energy that are hitting the particle. You can take a gun and weaken it so that it only shoots a few bullets a day, but if you get hit by one, you’re still dead”
“You guys didn’t get that email last night? I sent that at 11 – a good 4 hours past my bedtime!”
“These tools are invented by mathematicians for their own nefarious purposes, but they are actually very useful for us”
“Mathematicians are always ahead of physicists, and physicists are always a little bit ahead of engineers, although that difference is not always clear anymore. It’s because it takes so much time for our president to catch up with everything. He says ‘How many barrels of oil will we save by you studying quantum mechanics?’ and then we say ‘Well, zero barrels’ and he gets confused. So either you find this quantum stuff very useful or just use it to scare the hell out of everyone else”
“You can only have a state of definite momentum if you have e to the i dog x over h bar, where you have momentum equal to dog”
“Say you are a prisoner in a jail. If you are a quantum prisoner, your wavelength will be changing. So if you are a prisoner this is what I recommend to you – go back and forth banging into each wall, because there is a slight probability that if you keep doing this, you will find yourself outside of the jail. So even if you are sentenced for 100 lifetimes, it’s still worth a try.”
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Hmmm....
1. C2.5 h2+3 2. H2+3 p7+1 3. R1.2 r1+1
4. R2+4 c8.6 5. P3+1 e7+9 6. P3+1 e9+7
7. H3+4 h8+7 8. R2.3 e3+5 9. C8.6 h7+6
10. H4+6 h6+5 11. H6-5 c2+4 12. H5+6 c6.7
13. R3.2 c7+7 14. A4+5 c2.9 15. H6+7 r1.3
16. H7-5 c9+3 17. R2-4 c7.4 18. A5-4 c9.6
19. K5.6 c6.3 20. H5+3 a4+5 21. H8+7 c3.8
22. K6+1 r9.7 23. H3+4 r7.6 24. R9.2 r6+8
25. C5-1 r3.2 26. R2.7 r2+7 27. K6-1 r2.5
28. C6.1 r6+1 }END
4. R2+4 c8.6 5. P3+1 e7+9 6. P3+1 e9+7
7. H3+4 h8+7 8. R2.3 e3+5 9. C8.6 h7+6
10. H4+6 h6+5 11. H6-5 c2+4 12. H5+6 c6.7
13. R3.2 c7+7 14. A4+5 c2.9 15. H6+7 r1.3
16. H7-5 c9+3 17. R2-4 c7.4 18. A5-4 c9.6
19. K5.6 c6.3 20. H5+3 a4+5 21. H8+7 c3.8
22. K6+1 r9.7 23. H3+4 r7.6 24. R9.2 r6+8
25. C5-1 r3.2 26. R2.7 r2+7 27. K6-1 r2.5
28. C6.1 r6+1 }END
How to ban people from chess servers
1. Play a bullet game against a noob.
2. Hang your queen so that he takes 15 seconds to decide whether to take the queen and eventually declines it (for unknown reasons)
3. At this point in time, he should start accusing you of cheating in the game.
4. Make some random cultured snide remarks devoid of any profanities to incite him further.
5. At this point in time, he should be spewing all kinds of profanities out.
6. Notify the administrator and say goodbye to him.
2. Hang your queen so that he takes 15 seconds to decide whether to take the queen and eventually declines it (for unknown reasons)
3. At this point in time, he should start accusing you of cheating in the game.
4. Make some random cultured snide remarks devoid of any profanities to incite him further.
5. At this point in time, he should be spewing all kinds of profanities out.
6. Notify the administrator and say goodbye to him.
Drumroll number two
I have just invited another chess pro/noob (depending on perspective) as a coauthor of the blog! The blog will now be 50% more active! (it is hoped).
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Shorter... and Longer Posts
This blog shall be moving into a careful juxtapositioning of shorter and longer posts for maximum effect instead of just getting progressively longer (I'm running out of steam). This will be one of the short ones.
What if you were forced to write...
What would you write, if you had to write, and for a very important exam/assignment/test/assessment etc., and it was graded based on the quality and perceived effort put into the writing, and the topic was weird like...
Are factories worth more than forests?
...
Why write?
...
Would you save a forest or a starving child?
...
What if.
Are factories worth more than forests?
...
Why write?
...
Would you save a forest or a starving child?
...
What if.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
A random post
This post is supposed to be random, and about random. The stuff discussed here is not backed up by much (or even any) material that I have come across in the past years of my life. It just occured to me as I was on my way back... and missed the train (by about 20 seconds) for the 3rd time in a row (2 from the last trip).
This, as the blog post's title suggests, led me to think about bad luck, then luck, then randomness. This was how this post was born: on the way home.
Firstly, about luck. Luck to me is the goodness of the situation which occurs without one's planning. This is not to say that it cannot be of another person's planning: take for example a person walking on a road and being pickpocketed. This was to a certain extent, planned, by somebody else, but when referring to the person, it makes sense to say the person had bad luck. He was behaving in a normal way, walking out to do something, be it to buy lunch or to visit a relative, just like billions of other people in the world, or put into context, a few thousand people who are behaving just like him in a similar environment. Yet, he was the only person (in this scenario) to get pickpocketed. What do we call this? Bad luck.
Next, how bad is your luck? It might be intuitive to say 1/1000 people who were doing the same thing and did not get pickpocketed. But what if another person managed to slip and fall 3 times on a piece of chicken skin, a piece of paper, and a banana peel... and all while wearing the latest shoes with the most effective known grip? Truly bad luck as well. Or what might we say about another person in the thousand who lost 100 times as much as he-who-got-pickpocketed in say, shares? Surely those people are more unlucky? Hence, the figure 1/1000 needs improvement.
How I view it is that you have a known world, and an unknown world. (well generally so, but then again there are blurred areas, like when you think you know something, but it's wrong, or when you think something isn't, but it really is, or you somehow would know it if you ever thought of it) But just say for example you know distinctly a set of things, and you don't know another discreet set of things. Then how bad your luck be could be theorectically determined by a certain algorithm.
Firstly, I shall talk about multiple universes very briefly. Basically, as far as I get it, universes split into two whenever they have to make a choice on something (beats me what a choice is). And after a while, what you get is an effectively infinite number of universes, where very different stuff happen. For example, the nuclear bomb could have failed and clearly things would have come out differently (though how different is unknown; we can only speculate).
Next, we apply a similar concept to the world of the person-who-got-pickpocketed. This is not to say I approve of the theory mentioned above (I don't even understand it fully, and I don't see what's wrong with the deterministic worldview from a scientific point of view). But let us just say there are many universes, with whatever he-who-got-pickpocketed (bah! from now on referred to as Nom) knows to be fixed in all of them. For example, if he knows that there exists a school on the other side of the road, in all the universes, the school will be exactly where it is, and the exact same physics laws will be applied and fundamental phenomena will occur in the exact same way as he knows them to. However, on the other side of the Earth, the pyramids of Egypt might have been built, or they might not have, and this happens with on average 1/2 probability (depending on the known universe). All this will affect whether Nom is pickpocketed. (See butterfly effect*)
Now we rank all those outcomes of the separate possibilities in terms of how good they are for Nom. From this, the current outcome is given a rank, and it shows how unlucky Nom is.
Done with luck. Finally. And I'm getting tired. Now for randomness. *sigh*
Everybody knows about gambling (where everybody is a sweeping term). You put material on some unknown outcome and (usually not) win or (usually) lose money, especially for commercial gambling places.
We first look at how for example, the casino works. Let us look at a classic example. The roulette.
How this works is fundamentally based on the assumption that the results of the roulette wheel are sufficiently random. If anybody can predict certain rolls with sufficient (just a bit above pure guessing) confidence, then it's the end of the casino. More or less. Maybe the casino will adapt. Less I guess.
So let's assume a certain casino plays by a certain rule, and for a moment, let's pretend the complicated mess of ways to gamble on the roulette table never existed, and the only way to gamble was to guess a number. Out of 36+1=37 numbers (0 is usually considered special), you pick one, and if you guess correctly, for each dollar you originally placed on the table, you will win 35 dollars (get back 36 dollars).
So there are a total of assumed 37 possibilities, all with assumed equal probabilities of happening. Now let us apply a similar argument as compared to what happened in the discussion of luck. Of all the possible outcomes, let each one be represented by a universe (of sorts). In 36 universes, you lose 1 dollar. In the last, you win 35 dollars. If you somehow did a summation of all universes, you would realise that in total you lose 1 dollar. In other words, on average, you lose 1/37 of a dollar.
But I just realised that wasn't my point to start with. My point was randomness.
So say you start recording the numbers the appear on the roulette wheel as the ball stops.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, ... (Not a very convincing case, but sufficient perhaps)
You observe something! Wait a moment, 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 2+3=5, ... but wait another moment. 21+34=55. Not so useful now is it? Ha!
The true thing is actually that (again assuming the roulette wheel is well made) even though it has followed a pattern for the past few rolls, it may just come up with something totally killing the pattern, like 34 (yes again).
So say you see an infinite pattern of integers (whole numbers) from 1 to 9. 3,1,4,1,5,9,2,6,5,... (not very good at coming up with numbers am I?) Now, is this pattern really random? To me, it isn't, as the first 9 numbers in the series follow the digits of pi, and 3 is probably the next number. However, what about 3,5,7,9,1,5,7,1,6,5,8,9,2,4,7,...? I think it to be random, but the way my mind works may not be, given enough information in this rougly deterministic world, and some genius out there may be able to predict with say 12% certainty what the next number in the sequence would be.
So, how random is random?
To me, this boils down to how simplistic the pattern is.
To give an example, now we just look at a series of integers.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8...
This pattern is trivial to explain. Each is 1 more than the previous.
Then there are stuff like...
1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28, 36, 45
Where each number is the previous plus 2, 3, 4, ...
Then there is the theory that 3,5,7,8,4,5,4,6,15,156,6,5,4,6,2, ... can be described by a 14th degree polynomial (See Lagrange interpolation, no, not on this site).
So there, we just described it. But is it still random?
To a large part, yes, I just "randomly" typed numbers on the keyboard separated by commas. However, if you noticed, the largest number is only 3 digits, and this might be a reason to say it is not random. But as far as I'm concerned, this pattern is random because it doesn't have any easily explanable pattern for a series of its length.
I think I had more to say, but after so long, I pretty much forgot what I started off wanting to write, so for now, tada. Adieu. And arrivederci (cool word). Aah! "A"s! Atrocious! Already too hard for me to continue (see line itself for explanation why not all words began with A).
*Butterfly effect: When a butterfly flaps its wings in India, it can cause a tsunami in China. Ok, that's just my random restatement of the principle, but as far as I know, the principle still remains equivalent. How that happens, is in fact similar to the domino effect, where a small change in the initial state can result in a large change in endstate (all up, or all down). Similar things happen in real life. Now let me tell you a story (and cause a million people to die of different reasons).
A rat is in a maze. It turns left, and there is normality (as we know it).
If however, it had turned right...
It would have tipped the scales for the 95% confidence interval for the scientific report.
Which would have made the head scientist frustrated with life.
Which would have made him cancel his family trip to Thailand.
Which would mean that 200 shops in Thailand would go with one customer less.
Which might have been the critical point for starting a silent protest.
Which might have slowed down the Thailand economy.
Which would have in turn affected the amount of trade they did with the United States.
Which would have affected the President of the United States' mood for just a day.
Which would have influenced policies concerning 200 million citizens (number from failed memory).
Which would have made people hungry and hence kill rats as a substitute for animal fodder.
Now we review. Just because a single lab rat had made a "wrong" turn, it had caused a mini-holocaust of rats somewhere on the other side of the world. (depending on the scientist's nationality of course).
Not that this happens very often, but it does happen, and in ways impossible to predict. On the other hand, a tsunami might change little. There you go.
This, as the blog post's title suggests, led me to think about bad luck, then luck, then randomness. This was how this post was born: on the way home.
Firstly, about luck. Luck to me is the goodness of the situation which occurs without one's planning. This is not to say that it cannot be of another person's planning: take for example a person walking on a road and being pickpocketed. This was to a certain extent, planned, by somebody else, but when referring to the person, it makes sense to say the person had bad luck. He was behaving in a normal way, walking out to do something, be it to buy lunch or to visit a relative, just like billions of other people in the world, or put into context, a few thousand people who are behaving just like him in a similar environment. Yet, he was the only person (in this scenario) to get pickpocketed. What do we call this? Bad luck.
Next, how bad is your luck? It might be intuitive to say 1/1000 people who were doing the same thing and did not get pickpocketed. But what if another person managed to slip and fall 3 times on a piece of chicken skin, a piece of paper, and a banana peel... and all while wearing the latest shoes with the most effective known grip? Truly bad luck as well. Or what might we say about another person in the thousand who lost 100 times as much as he-who-got-pickpocketed in say, shares? Surely those people are more unlucky? Hence, the figure 1/1000 needs improvement.
How I view it is that you have a known world, and an unknown world. (well generally so, but then again there are blurred areas, like when you think you know something, but it's wrong, or when you think something isn't, but it really is, or you somehow would know it if you ever thought of it
Firstly, I shall talk about multiple universes very briefly. Basically, as far as I get it, universes split into two whenever they have to make a choice on something (beats me what a choice is). And after a while, what you get is an effectively infinite number of universes, where very different stuff happen. For example, the nuclear bomb could have failed and clearly things would have come out differently (though how different is unknown; we can only speculate).
Next, we apply a similar concept to the world of the person-who-got-pickpocketed. This is not to say I approve of the theory mentioned above (I don't even understand it fully, and I don't see what's wrong with the deterministic worldview from a scientific point of view). But let us just say there are many universes, with whatever he-who-got-pickpocketed (bah! from now on referred to as Nom) knows to be fixed in all of them. For example, if he knows that there exists a school on the other side of the road, in all the universes, the school will be exactly where it is, and the exact same physics laws will be applied and fundamental phenomena will occur in the exact same way as he knows them to. However, on the other side of the Earth, the pyramids of Egypt might have been built, or they might not have, and this happens with on average 1/2 probability (depending on the known universe). All this will affect whether Nom is pickpocketed. (See butterfly effect*)
Now we rank all those outcomes of the separate possibilities in terms of how good they are for Nom. From this, the current outcome is given a rank, and it shows how unlucky Nom is.
Done with luck. Finally. And I'm getting tired. Now for randomness. *sigh*
Everybody knows about gambling (where everybody is a sweeping term). You put material on some unknown outcome and (usually not) win or (usually) lose money, especially for commercial gambling places.
We first look at how for example, the casino works. Let us look at a classic example. The roulette.
How this works is fundamentally based on the assumption that the results of the roulette wheel are sufficiently random. If anybody can predict certain rolls with sufficient (just a bit above pure guessing) confidence, then it's the end of the casino. More or less. Maybe the casino will adapt. Less I guess.
So let's assume a certain casino plays by a certain rule, and for a moment, let's pretend the complicated mess of ways to gamble on the roulette table never existed, and the only way to gamble was to guess a number. Out of 36+1=37 numbers (0 is usually considered special), you pick one, and if you guess correctly, for each dollar you originally placed on the table, you will win 35 dollars (get back 36 dollars).
So there are a total of assumed 37 possibilities, all with assumed equal probabilities of happening. Now let us apply a similar argument as compared to what happened in the discussion of luck. Of all the possible outcomes, let each one be represented by a universe (of sorts). In 36 universes, you lose 1 dollar. In the last, you win 35 dollars. If you somehow did a summation of all universes, you would realise that in total you lose 1 dollar. In other words, on average, you lose 1/37 of a dollar.
But I just realised that wasn't my point to start with. My point was randomness.
So say you start recording the numbers the appear on the roulette wheel as the ball stops.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, ... (Not a very convincing case, but sufficient perhaps)
You observe something! Wait a moment, 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 2+3=5, ... but wait another moment. 21+34=55. Not so useful now is it? Ha!
The true thing is actually that (again assuming the roulette wheel is well made) even though it has followed a pattern for the past few rolls, it may just come up with something totally killing the pattern, like 34 (yes again).
So say you see an infinite pattern of integers (whole numbers) from 1 to 9. 3,1,4,1,5,9,2,6,5,... (not very good at coming up with numbers am I?) Now, is this pattern really random? To me, it isn't, as the first 9 numbers in the series follow the digits of pi, and 3 is probably the next number. However, what about 3,5,7,9,1,5,7,1,6,5,8,9,2,4,7,...? I think it to be random, but the way my mind works may not be, given enough information in this rougly deterministic world, and some genius out there may be able to predict with say 12% certainty what the next number in the sequence would be.
So, how random is random?
To me, this boils down to how simplistic the pattern is.
To give an example, now we just look at a series of integers.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8...
This pattern is trivial to explain. Each is 1 more than the previous.
Then there are stuff like...
1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28, 36, 45
Where each number is the previous plus 2, 3, 4, ...
Then there is the theory that 3,5,7,8,4,5,4,6,15,156,6,5,4,6,2, ... can be described by a 14th degree polynomial (See Lagrange interpolation, no, not on this site).
So there, we just described it. But is it still random?
To a large part, yes, I just "randomly" typed numbers on the keyboard separated by commas. However, if you noticed, the largest number is only 3 digits, and this might be a reason to say it is not random. But as far as I'm concerned, this pattern is random because it doesn't have any easily explanable pattern for a series of its length.
I think I had more to say, but after so long, I pretty much forgot what I started off wanting to write, so for now, tada. Adieu. And arrivederci (cool word). Aah! "A"s! Atrocious! Already too hard for me to continue (see line itself for explanation why not all words began with A).
*Butterfly effect: When a butterfly flaps its wings in India, it can cause a tsunami in China. Ok, that's just my random restatement of the principle, but as far as I know, the principle still remains equivalent. How that happens, is in fact similar to the domino effect, where a small change in the initial state can result in a large change in endstate (all up, or all down). Similar things happen in real life. Now let me tell you a story (and cause a million people to die of different reasons).
A rat is in a maze. It turns left, and there is normality (as we know it).
If however, it had turned right...
It would have tipped the scales for the 95% confidence interval for the scientific report.
Which would have made the head scientist frustrated with life.
Which would have made him cancel his family trip to Thailand.
Which would mean that 200 shops in Thailand would go with one customer less.
Which might have been the critical point for starting a silent protest.
Which might have slowed down the Thailand economy.
Which would have in turn affected the amount of trade they did with the United States.
Which would have affected the President of the United States' mood for just a day.
Which would have influenced policies concerning 200 million citizens (number from failed memory).
Which would have made people hungry and hence kill rats as a substitute for animal fodder.
Now we review. Just because a single lab rat had made a "wrong" turn, it had caused a mini-holocaust of rats somewhere on the other side of the world. (depending on the scientist's nationality of course).
Not that this happens very often, but it does happen, and in ways impossible to predict. On the other hand, a tsunami might change little. There you go.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
An appearance.
I am one who just seeks to appear normal and insane.
A little hard to pull both off at once, naturally, but it is doable.
To those literate in the chesses, of course. Normal with regard to the world. Your world, that is. Because it doesn't really matter how it is.
Within the virtual confines of a planar grid, imaginary pieces wage invisible war, careening between squares in an organised dance of combat.
It is the elegance with which these pieces dance that marks the insane. The better choreographed the moves, the better the general's insight. The more remarkable and surprising routines, ah, those routines...
Belong to the insane.
Not to say that doesn't win chess games. It does, with a genuinely unexpected success rate, somewhere between 2% to 50%, depending on the opposition. Ridiculous combinations of pieces and lines of defence, non-standard formations, they share a quality of beauty and practicality in their execution.
I wonder why so few people play chess creatively.
A little hard to pull both off at once, naturally, but it is doable.
To those literate in the chesses, of course. Normal with regard to the world. Your world, that is. Because it doesn't really matter how it is.
Within the virtual confines of a planar grid, imaginary pieces wage invisible war, careening between squares in an organised dance of combat.
It is the elegance with which these pieces dance that marks the insane. The better choreographed the moves, the better the general's insight. The more remarkable and surprising routines, ah, those routines...
Belong to the insane.
Not to say that doesn't win chess games. It does, with a genuinely unexpected success rate, somewhere between 2% to 50%, depending on the opposition. Ridiculous combinations of pieces and lines of defence, non-standard formations, they share a quality of beauty and practicality in their execution.
I wonder why so few people play chess creatively.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
About retarded stuff as well as being read by too many readers
First, the retarded stuff.
I was like, walking back from my old school today, when I had a conversation with somebody that went something like this:
Wait... legends first.
Legend
--------
Me: Well... me speaking
**: comment tags
B: The other person in the conversation... Let's just stick at Ben shall we... I prefer not to be killed.
*The all important question!*
Me: How much does a potato cost?
B: Less than a toma(e)to *where (e) indicates pronunciation, important later*
Me: How much does a toma(h)to cost? *Bad pronounciation, really (*typo intended*) *
B: More than a potato.
*Persistence!*
Me: So how much does a potato cost?
B: More than a toma(h)to.
*???*
Me: So what's the difference between a toma(e)to and a toma(h)to?
B: Price.
That was the retarded part. It was supposed to serve as an analogy of sorts, or as an intro to the rest of my blogpost, but it's like... too long, and retarded, and hard to use as a model for the rest of my blogpost.
Ok, so I was informed of this disturbing news: that I initiated a style of blogpost called time-constrained posting, where one day I got so bored I decided to type 1000 word in like 20 minutes. This has unfortunately caught on (the HORROR), and I would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused to the world in general. I will also start to advocate for less people reading my blog, as well as taking every single idea with a mountain of salt (pinch of salt might not work :( ).
So what strategies should I employ to keep people of my pseudo-semi-demi-quasi-hidden blog? If you do have strong opinions about this subject, please e-mail any feedback to haveyouhadyourpenquintoday@gmail.com. Please also do remember to buy a kilogram of salt before sending the email. I hereby thank all you readers for your anti-cooperation. Now shoo and never come back again.
I was like, walking back from my old school today, when I had a conversation with somebody that went something like this:
Wait... legends first.
Legend
--------
Me: Well... me speaking
*
B: The other person in the conversation... Let's just stick at Ben shall we... I prefer not to be killed.
*The all important question!*
Me: How much does a potato cost?
B: Less than a toma(e)to *where (e) indicates pronunciation, important later*
Me: How much does a toma(h)to cost? *Bad pronounciation, really (*typo intended*) *
B: More than a potato.
*Persistence!*
Me: So how much does a potato cost?
B: More than a toma(h)to.
*???*
Me: So what's the difference between a toma(e)to and a toma(h)to?
B: Price.
That was the retarded part. It was supposed to serve as an analogy of sorts, or as an intro to the rest of my blogpost, but it's like... too long, and retarded, and hard to use as a model for the rest of my blogpost.
Ok, so I was informed of this disturbing news: that I initiated a style of blogpost called time-constrained posting, where one day I got so bored I decided to type 1000 word in like 20 minutes. This has unfortunately caught on (the HORROR), and I would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused to the world in general. I will also start to advocate for less people reading my blog, as well as taking every single idea with a mountain of salt (pinch of salt might not work :( ).
So what strategies should I employ to keep people of my pseudo-semi-demi-quasi-hidden blog? If you do have strong opinions about this subject, please e-mail any feedback to haveyouhadyourpenquintoday@gmail.com. Please also do remember to buy a kilogram of salt before sending the email. I hereby thank all you readers for your anti-cooperation. Now shoo and never come back again.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Premoving
Yes, this blogpost was inspired by chess.com. And the brilliant idea of play 1 0 games.
So firstly, for those who don't know, 1 0 games means each person gets 1 minute at the start, and per move, he gets 0 seconds increment. In short, the player has to make about 40 moves in one minute. How fun.
The problem is then not how to get into a winning position (just think for 5 seconds a move and you'll thrash... for a while, and then you get into a horrible mess of time trouble), but rather how to get into a winning position fast, and how to win even faster from there.
It sounds like nonsense, but the fact is you can win a Queen+pawns versus approximately equal number of pawns endgame in about 10 seconds usually. (The trick is promoting 2 queens and checking until your opponent cries... and usually times out). So that is joyful to the 1 0 player.
To make the spam even more enjoyable, there is something called premove (terminology from a certain ELO rated 2000+- player) on chess.com. This means that you are allowed to make a move before your opponent makes him, and effectively takes 0 seconds to move, but the drawback is that it sometimes results in you doing stupid stuff. Eg. You have a brilliant tactic where you win a knight. You expect your opponent to minimise losses and play something like Nxh5. Hence, you set your promove to Bxh5. And then he brilliantly sacrifices a queen with something like Qa4. And the premove triggers. And instead your queen hangs.
However, premoves are epically important, like when you're 1 queen 2 rooks, 3 bishops, 4 knights up and have 1 second left (hey its possible!). A person not accustomed to premoves may randomly check about 3 times and run out of time. What a sad way to lose a game.
This is where premove skills come in. And to improve on premoving skills... you guessed it. Premoving puzzles!
I must admit, I totally fail at puzzle creation, but try to bear with me. I try to keep the blogpost interesting, not the puzzles (once again, I admit I fail at creating puzzles). So off to explain the rules.
1) You must move before your opponent's move finishes. Which means you must play a move such that no matter what he does, your move will be winning.
2) You know all of your opponents moves up to 1 move before. Eg.:
e4 ? premove: d4
Then it turns out he played e5. The server recognises you premoved and moves d4 for you. Now the situation becomes
e4 e5 d4 ? Premove: enter your move here.
My point? That you know your opponent's last move at every instance. Hence, a puzzle may have more than one line (but bah! I'm not that skillful).
3) Special puzzles may have special rules. Especially one that says something like: time for one move
What does that mean? It means for example you have 1 move of moving time, which you can use anywhere to RESPOND to your opponent's moves. This also happens when your condition move fails. eg:
1. e4 ? Premove: e5
and your opponent plays e5. Tada! Illegal move. You just wasted your one move of time.
So let's not randomly delay and move on to our first puzzle: a generic endgame: queen+king vs king.
Puzzle 2:
XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXKX
XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXP
PXXXKXXX
XXXXXXXX
cyan to move and win (is that called cyan?)
Puzzle 3:
RNBXXBXR
PPPRX XPP
XXXXPXKX
XBXXXXXX
XXXXXXPX
XXNPXNXP
PPPXXPXX
XXBKXXXR
cyan to move and win (I'm hoping this works)
Edit: Blah! It doesn't at all. I fail.
So firstly, for those who don't know, 1 0 games means each person gets 1 minute at the start, and per move, he gets 0 seconds increment. In short, the player has to make about 40 moves in one minute. How fun.
The problem is then not how to get into a winning position (just think for 5 seconds a move and you'll thrash... for a while, and then you get into a horrible mess of time trouble), but rather how to get into a winning position fast, and how to win even faster from there.
It sounds like nonsense, but the fact is you can win a Queen+pawns versus approximately equal number of pawns endgame in about 10 seconds usually. (The trick is promoting 2 queens and checking until your opponent cries... and usually times out). So that is joyful to the 1 0 player.
To make the spam even more enjoyable, there is something called premove (terminology from a certain ELO rated 2000+- player) on chess.com. This means that you are allowed to make a move before your opponent makes him, and effectively takes 0 seconds to move, but the drawback is that it sometimes results in you doing stupid stuff. Eg. You have a brilliant tactic where you win a knight. You expect your opponent to minimise losses and play something like Nxh5. Hence, you set your promove to Bxh5. And then he brilliantly sacrifices a queen with something like Qa4. And the premove triggers. And instead your queen hangs.
However, premoves are epically important, like when you're 1 queen 2 rooks, 3 bishops, 4 knights up and have 1 second left (hey its possible!). A person not accustomed to premoves may randomly check about 3 times and run out of time. What a sad way to lose a game.
This is where premove skills come in. And to improve on premoving skills... you guessed it. Premoving puzzles!
I must admit, I totally fail at puzzle creation, but try to bear with me. I try to keep the blogpost interesting, not the puzzles (once again, I admit I fail at creating puzzles). So off to explain the rules.
1) You must move before your opponent's move finishes. Which means you must play a move such that no matter what he does, your move will be winning.
2) You know all of your opponents moves up to 1 move before. Eg.:
e4 ? premove: d4
Then it turns out he played e5. The server recognises you premoved and moves d4 for you. Now the situation becomes
e4 e5 d4 ? Premove: enter your move here.
My point? That you know your opponent's last move at every instance. Hence, a puzzle may have more than one line (but bah! I'm not that skillful).
3) Special puzzles may have special rules. Especially one that says something like: time for one move
What does that mean? It means for example you have 1 move of moving time, which you can use anywhere to RESPOND to your opponent's moves. This also happens when your condition move fails. eg:
1. e4 ? Premove: e5
and your opponent plays e5. Tada! Illegal move. You just wasted your one move of time.
So let's not randomly delay and move on to our first puzzle: a generic endgame: queen+king vs king.
Puzzle 2:
XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXKX
XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXP
PXXXKXXX
XXXXXXXX
cyan to move and win (is that called cyan?)
Puzzle 3:
RNBXXBXR
PPPRX XPP
XXXXPXKX
XBXXXXXX
XXXXXXPX
XXNPXNXP
PPPXXPXX
XXBKXXXR
cyan to move and win (I'm hoping this works)
Edit: Blah! It doesn't at all. I fail.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
The long essay spamming method
This method, which I propose to spam an essay in an as short as possible span of time, is fully and totally created by me, while writing this long and useless essay, so take whatever advice here with a pinch of pepperoni pizza. Or some substitue that tastes roughly as nice.
This blogpost was written on notepad, and I have absolutely no idea how long/short it is at the moment, but I do plan to finish with this in 20 minutes, which means by 9:33 on my computer's clock time.
Next, on to a bit of history on this seemingly totally random topic, with actually a bit of cause behind it, hence it is not totally random. Basically, there was a piece of homework-like assignment thing that we were given, and we had to write a reflection on the common tests, and I wrote mine in about 5 minutes, and in total it contained about 150 words (144 to be exact, but I'm spamming). Next, my friend S-- asked me to help him print his reflections, and thinking that it might be as short as mine, I heartily agreed.
This is not a blogpost to complain about how much ink was wasted printing his reflections.
This blogpost, though, is inspired by his spamming ability, and after reading through his 1.6 thousand words of not really a lot of content, I decided to see what nonsense I can write (in the longest possible way, so as to be mildly convincing) about the topic of spamming a lot of words.
Firstly, there is the aim that we have to define. Obviously, if we have a lot of content (like topic=world and whatever happens today in this world), there will be a lot to write on (if you are really that desperate for words). In fact, if I were to type a report on my life today, 3000 words ought not to be a big problem apart from getting bored. Hence, there is actually a more refined aim of getting a good word to content ratio. This roughly means: more content, more words; less content, less words.
Hence, we will use this blogpost of limited content. The content was created while walking home from the MRT which is like a 5 minute walk away.
That is really not a lot of content (mind is dead from chessing for 4 hours straight today). Hence, my aim of 1000 words in 20 minutes is really a huge uphill task, and I don't even have a word counter. T_T.
So from here, I believe I have already wasted like 300 words, and for the people who value their time, discretion is advised on whether to read the full blogpost. I think it would be fun to read the first sentence of each paragraph though. I hope those make sense. Roughly.
Firstly, state your point.
Example:
I want to spam long essays about practically nothing.
Next, elaborate:
I have near zero content, but I want it to look like a full-fledged blogpost. Hence, I am wasting words. I can't think of a lot more, but I am still wasting words to prove the point.
Next, give examples:
As you can see from my previous 3 sentences, that was like 20 words out of nothing at all.
Next, elaborate on the examples:
If let say I had not included the past three sentences, would my content be reduced? Clearly not. However, to ensure my goal of making this blogpost exceed 1000 words while conforming to the 20 minute limit I randomly set myself to minimise time wastage, the goal would have been harder without the examples, but from the examples, it can be clearly seen that it is self-evident that... *word waste*... giving random examples which are not the main point will help to increase word count.
Before I forget, (or have I already mentioned)? The methods proposed here were not stolen from S--'s essay, nor modelled from it, but as a general afterthought of his essay being nearly 12 times my length. On with more essay about semirelevant points to the irrelevant and entropic topic.
Next, remember your introduction and conclusion (yes I forgot a good long word-wasting introduction, but now is fine):
On second thoughts, the introduction can be just ripped off the start of this post. It wasted 300 words about background stuff, which is not really relevant.
Next, attempt to keep repeating points. To not look like a complete failure trying to spam 1000 words in 20 minutes (50 wpm... wah!), you should attempt to vary your phrasing. For example, the same phrase "the delicious cake" could be written as "the cake that was delicious", "cake deliciousness", or "caky deliciousness", even though I'm not too sure caky is a word (cakey?).
As you can see, this is extremely important. If you strive not to repeat points, what content you see is what you get. However, the purpose of this essay is not to discuss situations where you have sufficient content to actually write something good, but rather on the other hand, write a good amount of stuff out of random thoughts and unorganised insights. Hence, repetition comes into the show. If you can repeat a 10-word idea 3 times, that is at least 30 words, but in fact, with bad phrasing "the boy who was bald like an eagle", you can extend "a bald boy" to something much more. And the total amount of content doesn't change!
Repetition is important. Even in literature. Have you seen books which use a catch-sentence? Like some random sentence that appears 20 times in different areas in a mere 5 pages of text, and would appear to have stemmed from a lazy author. And those are good literature, unlike this. With sufficiently low expectations, why not just do your own non-well-thought version of repetition and repeat the same idea?
Repetition is important. It allows you to get the point. It even helps readers to remember it without reading the same passage 3 times over. (because it is already repeated 3 times over in one passage; talk about time savings!).
Repetition is important. You got the point, I hope. If not...
Repetition is important...
Repetition is important... why are these words so long to type.
I have 2 minutes left now, actually less, and hence I will conclude this essay-like thing.
You must restate everything in a conclusion, but since I forgot most of it, I believe it can be summarised thus: introduction, where you state your idea briefly, point, where you state your point (try to split them up), examples (where you spam nonsense), elaboration on examples (uh oh), as well as repetition, which transcends the parts.
*20 minutes end, miscelleneous stuff*
I will attempt to read this myself, and then write a reflection post. Could really be useful for GP writing when you have 20 minutes left for an essay (except I can't write that fast. Ah well...)
This blogpost was written on notepad, and I have absolutely no idea how long/short it is at the moment, but I do plan to finish with this in 20 minutes, which means by 9:33 on my computer's clock time.
Next, on to a bit of history on this seemingly totally random topic, with actually a bit of cause behind it, hence it is not totally random. Basically, there was a piece of homework-like assignment thing that we were given, and we had to write a reflection on the common tests, and I wrote mine in about 5 minutes, and in total it contained about 150 words (144 to be exact, but I'm spamming). Next, my friend S-- asked me to help him print his reflections, and thinking that it might be as short as mine, I heartily agreed.
This is not a blogpost to complain about how much ink was wasted printing his reflections.
This blogpost, though, is inspired by his spamming ability, and after reading through his 1.6 thousand words of not really a lot of content, I decided to see what nonsense I can write (in the longest possible way, so as to be mildly convincing) about the topic of spamming a lot of words.
Firstly, there is the aim that we have to define. Obviously, if we have a lot of content (like topic=world and whatever happens today in this world), there will be a lot to write on (if you are really that desperate for words). In fact, if I were to type a report on my life today, 3000 words ought not to be a big problem apart from getting bored. Hence, there is actually a more refined aim of getting a good word to content ratio. This roughly means: more content, more words; less content, less words.
Hence, we will use this blogpost of limited content. The content was created while walking home from the MRT which is like a 5 minute walk away.
That is really not a lot of content (mind is dead from chessing for 4 hours straight today). Hence, my aim of 1000 words in 20 minutes is really a huge uphill task, and I don't even have a word counter. T_T.
So from here, I believe I have already wasted like 300 words, and for the people who value their time, discretion is advised on whether to read the full blogpost. I think it would be fun to read the first sentence of each paragraph though. I hope those make sense. Roughly.
Firstly, state your point.
Example:
I want to spam long essays about practically nothing.
Next, elaborate:
I have near zero content, but I want it to look like a full-fledged blogpost. Hence, I am wasting words. I can't think of a lot more, but I am still wasting words to prove the point.
Next, give examples:
As you can see from my previous 3 sentences, that was like 20 words out of nothing at all.
Next, elaborate on the examples:
If let say I had not included the past three sentences, would my content be reduced? Clearly not. However, to ensure my goal of making this blogpost exceed 1000 words while conforming to the 20 minute limit I randomly set myself to minimise time wastage, the goal would have been harder without the examples, but from the examples, it can be clearly seen that it is self-evident that... *word waste*... giving random examples which are not the main point will help to increase word count.
Before I forget, (or have I already mentioned)? The methods proposed here were not stolen from S--'s essay, nor modelled from it, but as a general afterthought of his essay being nearly 12 times my length. On with more essay about semirelevant points to the irrelevant and entropic topic.
Next, remember your introduction and conclusion (yes I forgot a good long word-wasting introduction, but now is fine):
On second thoughts, the introduction can be just ripped off the start of this post. It wasted 300 words about background stuff, which is not really relevant.
Next, attempt to keep repeating points. To not look like a complete failure trying to spam 1000 words in 20 minutes (50 wpm... wah!), you should attempt to vary your phrasing. For example, the same phrase "the delicious cake" could be written as "the cake that was delicious", "cake deliciousness", or "caky deliciousness", even though I'm not too sure caky is a word (cakey?).
As you can see, this is extremely important. If you strive not to repeat points, what content you see is what you get. However, the purpose of this essay is not to discuss situations where you have sufficient content to actually write something good, but rather on the other hand, write a good amount of stuff out of random thoughts and unorganised insights. Hence, repetition comes into the show. If you can repeat a 10-word idea 3 times, that is at least 30 words, but in fact, with bad phrasing "the boy who was bald like an eagle", you can extend "a bald boy" to something much more. And the total amount of content doesn't change!
Repetition is important. Even in literature. Have you seen books which use a catch-sentence? Like some random sentence that appears 20 times in different areas in a mere 5 pages of text, and would appear to have stemmed from a lazy author. And those are good literature, unlike this. With sufficiently low expectations, why not just do your own non-well-thought version of repetition and repeat the same idea?
Repetition is important. It allows you to get the point. It even helps readers to remember it without reading the same passage 3 times over. (because it is already repeated 3 times over in one passage; talk about time savings!).
Repetition is important. You got the point, I hope. If not...
Repetition is important...
Repetition is important... why are these words so long to type.
I have 2 minutes left now, actually less, and hence I will conclude this essay-like thing.
You must restate everything in a conclusion, but since I forgot most of it, I believe it can be summarised thus: introduction, where you state your idea briefly, point, where you state your point (try to split them up), examples (where you spam nonsense), elaboration on examples (uh oh), as well as repetition, which transcends the parts.
*20 minutes end, miscelleneous stuff*
I will attempt to read this myself, and then write a reflection post. Could really be useful for GP writing when you have 20 minutes left for an essay (except I can't write that fast. Ah well...)
Thursday, July 8, 2010
The glass toilet door
Ok, now that is one totally random sounding title, but in fact, some of the readers which can be expressed in terms of p/q , where p and q are both integers. That might possibly be because this post is based on a real phenomenon that happens right at my house, in the toilet, and is related to nothing less than the glass toilet door (separating the shower and the rest of the toilet).
So this is what happens. The glass door is open. It is stationary (not a self-shutting door). I get extremely angry with the thought of certain examinations which I have just failed (Tis' called mix and match) and hence bang the door near the pivot. The door shakes wildly, and starts inching closer to closing... when I am frantically banging (ok doesn't work if I bang too hard) the door in the opposite direction. This appears to be a violation of physics, but I don't believe so. Can you solve the mystery before you read my theory about why the door flies opposite to the direction of the force(of banging)?
My theory shall be written in like... white?
This has, in fact a little bit to do with statistics :(. My theory is that the door is actually swinging inwards (tendency to close itself), but static friction is just sufficient to stop the motion of the door closing itself. However, when I bang the door near the pivot, this creates a small force acting against the rotation of the door towards closure, but it creates a large vibration for motion on both sides. Hence, you can think of it as a normal distribution with mean less than the initial force from the hinges in the same direction, but with the variance needed to occasionally overcome static friction. Bad explanation, but some people should get what I'm trying to say I guess...
So this is what happens. The glass door is open. It is stationary (not a self-shutting door). I get extremely angry with the thought of certain examinations which I have just failed (Tis' called mix and match) and hence bang the door near the pivot. The door shakes wildly, and starts inching closer to closing... when I am frantically banging (ok doesn't work if I bang too hard) the door in the opposite direction. This appears to be a violation of physics, but I don't believe so. Can you solve the mystery before you read my theory about why the door flies opposite to the direction of the force(of banging)?
My theory shall be written in like... white?
This has, in fact a little bit to do with statistics :(. My theory is that the door is actually swinging inwards (tendency to close itself), but static friction is just sufficient to stop the motion of the door closing itself. However, when I bang the door near the pivot, this creates a small force acting against the rotation of the door towards closure, but it creates a large vibration for motion on both sides. Hence, you can think of it as a normal distribution with mean less than the initial force from the hinges in the same direction, but with the variance needed to occasionally overcome static friction. Bad explanation, but some people should get what I'm trying to say I guess...
Monday, June 14, 2010
The match against the J
Evaluations: 1 bing is worth 1 bing, the rest of the values are exaggerated by 1000 times. (or more)
"FORMAT WXF
RED ~50141 ; 0 ;;
BLACK ~50142 ; 0 ;;
RESULT 1-0
DATE 2010-01-22 11:41:59
EVENT KGP Game ; 10m+0s
START{
1. P1+1 h8+7 2. P3+1 p3+1 3. P9+1 h2+3
4. C8.5 r1+1 5. H2+3 r1.4 6. H3+4 r4.6
7. H4+3 c2+3 8. H8+9 c2.4 9. H9+8 e3+5
10. C2.3 r6+6 11. C3-1 r6+1 12. C3+1 r9+1
13. R1.2 c8+6 14. A6+5 c4.9 15. H8-6 c9.8
16. H3-2 r9.8 17. C3+5 r8.3 18. C5.6 a6+5
19. C6-1 r6-2 20. R2+1 r6.5 21. H6-7 r5.3
22. H7+9 r+.1 23. H2+1 h3+4 24. R2+8 a5-6
25. H1+2 r3.7 26. C3+2 e5-7 27. R9.8 r1.8
28. R8+8 r7.2 29. H2-4 r2.6 30. R2-6 r6+1
31. E3+5 r6+3 32. R2.6 r6.1 33. R6+2 e7+5
34. R6+2 a6+5 35. R6.5 r1.3 36. C6.8 r3.7
37. C8+7 k5.6 38. R5-1 r7.6 39. R5.9 r6.2
40. H9+8 p3+1 41. E5+7 a5+4 42. R9.6 k6+1
43. R6+1 k6.5 44. R6+2 k5+1 45. H8+7 k5.6
46. A5-6 k6-1 47. H7-5 k6.5 48. R6-2 k5-1
49. C8.6 k5.6 50. H5+4 k6+1 51. C6.7 k6-1
52. C7-3 }END"
ok that's the game score. Now for the "analysis".
I will mostly be giving from my point of view.(ie red's point of view)
To understand my first 3 moves, you must first delve deep into my understanding of chess as of now (amid an insanity streak). Bings are awesome (even though they imbalance the game), but there is actually something even more awesome than a bing. If you guessed its the jiang, then you are wrong, because according to standing M theories of chess, the only thing more awesome than a bing is a bing that has crossed the river.
1. P1+1 h8+7 2. P3+1 p3+1 3. P9+1 h2+3
So let's go back to the game. The first move pushes a bing. The second move pushes another bing. The third move also pushes a bing. On the other hand, my opponent, minusing off the crushingness of losing by 5 whole bings from the very beginning (actually its 5 bings - 5 zus, but not if you consider it to 3 significant figures). Coupled with the 3 advanced bings waiting to cunningly cross the river, I evaluate the position as +0.1 bings.
4. C8.5 r1+1 5. H2+3 r1.4 6. H3+4 r4.6?????
As you can see, I deviated from my perfect strategy of advancing bings because there were actually no more bings that could be safely advanced. You might think that P5+1 is a safe place for a bing, but after advancing it, there is little you can do you protect it from a rampaging centralised pao.
At this position, I have a free zu that can be taken with immediate effect. Also, it provides me with 1 piece across the river, but he can move his rook across too, hence I evaluate the position +1.2 bings up for me.
7. H4+3 c2+3 8. H8+9 c2.4 9. H9+8 e3+5
So... what happened was i won a zu. Cheers. And his pao moved over the river, which I personally don't find aesthetically pleasing. But that's just me. And I would rate the position about errr... +2.4/2=1.2, because a zhong xiang delays practically every win. :(.
10. C2.3 r6+6 11. C3-1 r6+1 12. C3+1 r9+1
Action! J crazily chased my cannon around 2 times! (and gained a free tempo!) Also interesting (and fail) was 11. N3+5?? C8=5 12. C3+5 C5+4+, which wins the zhongbing and will make me hate my position in general :(. So anyway back to the main line, I think I just failed and didn't see the counter. So it's +1.2 to me (!!)
13. R1.2 c8+6 14. A6+5 c4.9 15. H8-6 c9.8
The previous "analysis" was written years ago and my brain has rusted, so this will continue in a more unpredictable (random) fashion. 13. R1.2 chases the pao away, but then 13...C8+6! makes my che/ju... which shld I use... Rook! uhh... sort of stuckish, but then since he is using 2 pieces to make my 1 piece stuck, it's sort of worth it I guess. 14. A6+5 is a turtlish move showing utterly no intention of displaying the manliness of sacrifice, and amidst the turtling, J played 14...C4.9 (xP)! As another bing fell, it was sort of traumatic for me; furthermore, my ma was under attack, and it seemed like I had to react quickly. Seeing as there was no zu to munch on, I gota little completely lost and confused, and played the weak move 15.H8-6, retreating and reinforcing the already turtle-like turtle that my defense was.
But as turtle as turtle is, there is no good way to attack and destroy a turtle (apart from being fantastically good at chess), and in the midst of his plans to force a turtle soup, J played the somewhat blunderous move 15...C9.8, hanging his pao in limbo.
16. H3-2 r9.8 17. C3+5 r8.3 18. C5.6 a6+5
I happily munched on his free pao. It tasted somewhat good. 16... R9.8 gained a tempo back as revenge for the extremely brave and/or stupid pao... if I wasn't such a complicated person. 17.C3+5 (xH) raised the complications a notch higher. (from 0 to 1), and J played 17...R8.3, which was a psychological blunder, since it now appears that he just wasted his previous move. With the newly found tempo, I sneakily played the sneaky move 18.C5.6. It is indeed quite hard to determine for sure, but I do theorize that J was suffering from a psychological condition called Suspicion Bonus (Medical name: Nyudunkopemybeengormaorpaoorzuoranythingofmineandalsonotcheckmatemeorstalemateme Somethingtomakethemedicalnamelongerophobia), and he tried to turtle behind the turtle of a move 18...A6+5.
*gulp* I forgot to mention a semi-important variation to waste more of an unwary reader's time. 17...R8+4 18.C3.7. Or perhaps even 17...R6-6 18.H2+1 (freeBING zu!!) R8+2 19.C3+1
19. C6-1 r6-2 20. R2+1 r6.5 21. H6-7 r5.3
19. C6-1 appears to have won a piece, but since it's my move, it follows that there's nothing much about the move worth talking about. Following the move, J got a free bing as compensation. It was a zhongbing too! And followed by another bing (T_T).
22. H7+9 r+.1 23. H2+1 h3+4 24. R2+8 a5-6
I got my revenge and gobbled a zu. Strangely enough, he wasn't too sure my bing was tasty. Weird behavior. Probably Suspicion Bonus. Then, I attempted to aggro.
25. H1+2 r3.7 26. C3+2 e5-7 27. R9.8 r1.8
28. R8+8 r7.2 29. H2-4 r2.6 30. R2-6 r6+1
A failed attempted tactic by me. What's there to talk about. Really.
31. E3+5 r6+3 32. R2.6 r6.1 33. R6+2 e7+5
I mobilised my elephant to turtle, then got some sort-of-free ma to fill my stomach. J got another bing. I have 1 last bing left :*(.
34. R6+2 a6+5 35. R6.5 r1.3 36. C6.8 r3.7
I happily feasted on the bulk of an elephant and attempted a cheapoe, but instead I lost my last bing. Talk about fail.
*fast forward* 41.E5+7. REVENGE! I got all his zus! *smile*
*fast forward, again* move 52... resign/timeout. :( (no opportunity to attempt a symmetrical kill)
Summary:
1) I fail. Massively.
2) J finished off my soldiers before I wiped his army out.
3) In the opening, J demonstrated his devastating opening powers and managed to grab a few bings.
4) I got lucky, and managed to win back every single soldier I lost :)
5) I fail. Really.
"FORMAT WXF
RED ~50141 ; 0 ;;
BLACK ~50142 ; 0 ;;
RESULT 1-0
DATE 2010-01-22 11:41:59
EVENT KGP Game ; 10m+0s
START{
1. P1+1 h8+7 2. P3+1 p3+1 3. P9+1 h2+3
4. C8.5 r1+1 5. H2+3 r1.4 6. H3+4 r4.6
7. H4+3 c2+3 8. H8+9 c2.4 9. H9+8 e3+5
10. C2.3 r6+6 11. C3-1 r6+1 12. C3+1 r9+1
13. R1.2 c8+6 14. A6+5 c4.9 15. H8-6 c9.8
16. H3-2 r9.8 17. C3+5 r8.3 18. C5.6 a6+5
19. C6-1 r6-2 20. R2+1 r6.5 21. H6-7 r5.3
22. H7+9 r+.1 23. H2+1 h3+4 24. R2+8 a5-6
25. H1+2 r3.7 26. C3+2 e5-7 27. R9.8 r1.8
28. R8+8 r7.2 29. H2-4 r2.6 30. R2-6 r6+1
31. E3+5 r6+3 32. R2.6 r6.1 33. R6+2 e7+5
34. R6+2 a6+5 35. R6.5 r1.3 36. C6.8 r3.7
37. C8+7 k5.6 38. R5-1 r7.6 39. R5.9 r6.2
40. H9+8 p3+1 41. E5+7 a5+4 42. R9.6 k6+1
43. R6+1 k6.5 44. R6+2 k5+1 45. H8+7 k5.6
46. A5-6 k6-1 47. H7-5 k6.5 48. R6-2 k5-1
49. C8.6 k5.6 50. H5+4 k6+1 51. C6.7 k6-1
52. C7-3 }END"
ok that's the game score. Now for the "analysis".
I will mostly be giving from my point of view.(ie red's point of view)
To understand my first 3 moves, you must first delve deep into my understanding of chess as of now (amid an insanity streak). Bings are awesome (even though they imbalance the game), but there is actually something even more awesome than a bing. If you guessed its the jiang, then you are wrong, because according to standing M theories of chess, the only thing more awesome than a bing is a bing that has crossed the river.
1. P1+1 h8+7 2. P3+1 p3+1 3. P9+1 h2+3
So let's go back to the game. The first move pushes a bing. The second move pushes another bing. The third move also pushes a bing. On the other hand, my opponent, minusing off the crushingness of losing by 5 whole bings from the very beginning (actually its 5 bings - 5 zus, but not if you consider it to 3 significant figures). Coupled with the 3 advanced bings waiting to cunningly cross the river, I evaluate the position as +0.1 bings.
4. C8.5 r1+1 5. H2+3 r1.4 6. H3+4 r4.6?????
As you can see, I deviated from my perfect strategy of advancing bings because there were actually no more bings that could be safely advanced. You might think that P5+1 is a safe place for a bing, but after advancing it, there is little you can do you protect it from a rampaging centralised pao.
At this position, I have a free zu that can be taken with immediate effect. Also, it provides me with 1 piece across the river, but he can move his rook across too, hence I evaluate the position +1.2 bings up for me.
7. H4+3 c2+3 8. H8+9 c2.4 9. H9+8 e3+5
So... what happened was i won a zu. Cheers. And his pao moved over the river, which I personally don't find aesthetically pleasing. But that's just me. And I would rate the position about errr... +2.4/2=1.2, because a zhong xiang delays practically every win. :(.
10. C2.3 r6+6 11. C3-1 r6+1 12. C3+1 r9+1
Action! J crazily chased my cannon around 2 times! (and gained a free tempo!) Also interesting (and fail) was 11. N3+5?? C8=5 12. C3+5 C5+4+, which wins the zhongbing and will make me hate my position in general :(. So anyway back to the main line, I think I just failed and didn't see the counter. So it's +1.2 to me (!!)
13. R1.2 c8+6 14. A6+5 c4.9 15. H8-6 c9.8
The previous "analysis" was written years ago and my brain has rusted, so this will continue in a more unpredictable (random) fashion. 13. R1.2 chases the pao away, but then 13...C8+6! makes my che/ju... which shld I use... Rook! uhh... sort of stuckish, but then since he is using 2 pieces to make my 1 piece stuck, it's sort of worth it I guess. 14. A6+5 is a turtlish move showing utterly no intention of displaying the manliness of sacrifice, and amidst the turtling, J played 14...C4.9 (xP)! As another bing fell, it was sort of traumatic for me; furthermore, my ma was under attack, and it seemed like I had to react quickly. Seeing as there was no zu to munch on, I got
But as turtle as turtle is, there is no good way to attack and destroy a turtle (apart from being fantastically good at chess), and in the midst of his plans to force a turtle soup, J played the somewhat blunderous move 15...C9.8, hanging his pao in limbo.
16. H3-2 r9.8 17. C3+5 r8.3 18. C5.6 a6+5
I happily munched on his free pao. It tasted somewhat good. 16... R9.8 gained a tempo back as revenge for the extremely brave and/or stupid pao... if I wasn't such a complicated person. 17.C3+5 (xH) raised the complications a notch higher. (from 0 to 1), and J played 17...R8.3, which was a psychological blunder, since it now appears that he just wasted his previous move. With the newly found tempo, I sneakily played the sneaky move 18.C5.6. It is indeed quite hard to determine for sure, but I do theorize that J was suffering from a psychological condition called Suspicion Bonus (Medical name: Nyudunkopemybeengormaorpaoorzuoranythingofmineandalsonotcheckmatemeorstalemateme Somethingtomakethemedicalnamelongerophobia), and he tried to turtle behind the turtle of a move 18...A6+5.
*gulp* I forgot to mention a semi-important variation to waste more of an unwary reader's time. 17...R8+4 18.C3.7. Or perhaps even 17...R6-6 18.H2+1 (free
19. C6-1 r6-2 20. R2+1 r6.5 21. H6-7 r5.3
19. C6-1 appears to have won a piece, but since it's my move, it follows that there's nothing much about the move worth talking about. Following the move, J got a free bing as compensation. It was a zhongbing too! And followed by another bing (T_T).
22. H7+9 r+.1 23. H2+1 h3+4 24. R2+8 a5-6
I got my revenge and gobbled a zu. Strangely enough, he wasn't too sure my bing was tasty. Weird behavior. Probably Suspicion Bonus. Then, I attempted to aggro.
25. H1+2 r3.7 26. C3+2 e5-7 27. R9.8 r1.8
28. R8+8 r7.2 29. H2-4 r2.6 30. R2-6 r6+1
A failed attempted tactic by me. What's there to talk about. Really.
31. E3+5 r6+3 32. R2.6 r6.1 33. R6+2 e7+5
I mobilised my elephant to turtle, then got some sort-of-free ma to fill my stomach. J got another bing. I have 1 last bing left :*(.
34. R6+2 a6+5 35. R6.5 r1.3 36. C6.8 r3.7
I happily feasted on the bulk of an elephant and attempted a cheapoe, but instead I lost my last bing. Talk about fail.
*fast forward* 41.E5+7. REVENGE! I got all his zus! *smile*
*fast forward, again* move 52... resign/timeout. :( (no opportunity to attempt a symmetrical kill)
Summary:
1) I fail. Massively.
2) J finished off my soldiers before I wiped his army out.
3) In the opening, J demonstrated his devastating opening powers and managed to grab a few bings.
4) I got lucky, and managed to win back every single soldier I lost :)
5) I fail. Really.
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