On science, mathematics, and computing
I recently had my first experience with an LLM solving a seemingly open problem. I wrote about this problem last November, in the form of a proposed card trick presented by a magician with an assistant: With the magician s back Continue reading
This weekend 6/28 is “Two-Pi Day” (or Tau Day, if you like). Continuing to be on the lookout for surprising or unexpected occurrences of , this year I didn t have to look farther than an interesting paper by Grimmett [2] Continue reading
Introduction T. Kelly writes in [1] about What Every Experimenter Must Know About Randomization. In a running example scenario throughout the paper, Kelly describes a hypothetical poultry farmer who, wondering whether exposing his turkeys to television will fatten them up, Continue reading
Introduction In the dice game Biscuits, a player rolls 12d6+1d8+1d10+1d12, then selects one or more of the rolled dice to set aside, rolling the remainder again, continuing this process until eventually all 15 dice have been set aside. The player s Continue reading
During the holidays, my niece introduced me to a bottle match game, variants of which have apparently made the rounds online for a while now, but it was new to me. She secretly arranges seven wooden bottle-shaped pegs, each of Continue reading
Introduction In Zach Wissner-Gross s Fiddler on the Proof, he mentions the following problem from nearly five years ago, when it was still FiveThirtyEight’s The Riddler: You are one of finalists in a skiing championship. There are two rounds: in the Continue reading
Nearly 15 years ago, I wrote about the following trick attributed to William Fitch Cheney, Jr., in [1]: Effect 1: While the magician turns their back or even leaves the room, a spectator shuffles a standard deck of cards, and Continue reading
Introduction Alice and Bob ride their bicycles together to work each day. They each secure their bicycles using chain combination locks with dials, with 10 decimal digits on each dial. I notice you always take longer than I do to Continue reading
Here is a neat trick: our friend, Paul, has asked us for help estimating his skill at the shooting range. Every day for the past several years, he has diligently recorded the number of successful shots he took that day. Continue reading
There has not been a puzzle here in a while, so Alice is playing a card game with her nephew, Bob, using a standard deck of playing cards. Alice starts with the 26 red cards in her hand, and Bob Continue reading