OddThinking

How many Australian locations have repeated names, like Wagga Wagga, Woy Woy and Curl Curl?

“But, Julian,” I hear you ask, “What words in the English language have the most anagrams?”

I ran a Monte Carlo simulation to test whether occasional attendees have a rosier view of attendance levels than the regulars.

One of the many reasons I have been quiet recently is I am working on a personal project – an amateur stop-motion video. The final product will appear to be a large group of my friends playing music in an orchestra. The raw material I have is dozens of sets of still photos of my friends pretending to play instruments in front of a green-screen. Each set has about 10 photos of the person playing the instrument.

I am working on an interesting challenge, and I thought that I might benefit if I wrote it out as a blog article to force me to think it through.

Here’s an idea for a Hangman variation, that I am calling Fuzzy Hangman.

So, you think you are pretty good at Hangman? You think you have what it takes?

Well, I am here to tell you the truth.

It’s a corporate Christmas party, around 1999. The dot com crash hasn’t happened yet, the party-organisers have a considerable budget, 200-300 guests, and an idea of a good time strongly influenced by the company’s sales and marketing teams – people who have a tendency to differ from my idea of a good time.

I consider how to maximise my happiness in this situation.

Wherein Julian finds he can re-use hobby code to solve a real-life problem.

I have often considered writing a Battleship-playing AI, but I never have.

Now, I discover, there is a Battleship-playing AI competition, which I don’t have the time (or .NET experience) to enter.

Laserbox, from Dust United, is another casual logic game that I have been playing.