http://bit-player.org An amateur's outlook on computation and mathematics. Thu, 15 May 2008 06:36:41 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A few weeks ago I playfully suggested that the Democratic nominee for POTUS might be selected this year by a game of hex played on the map of the lower 48 states. I emphasize the word “playfully.” This was not a serious suggestion. But life has a way of overtaking ... http://bit-player.org/2008/electoral-rehex When I finished writing about the Zeno wagering game recently, I had some trees left over, so I thought I would try planting them here. In the Zeno article I was trying to understand and explain the structure of this peculiar-looking tree, which I’ll call the tangled tree: As a warmup ... http://bit-player.org/2008/the-problem-of-describing-trees From the Associated Press, via the New York Times: LOS ANGELES (AP) — California faces an almost certain risk of being rocked by a strong earthquake by 2037, scientists said in the first statewide temblor forecast. New calculations reveal there is a 99.7 percent chance a magnitude 6.7 quake or larger will ... http://bit-player.org/2008/the-temblor-forecast The latest issue of American Scientist is just out, both on the newsstand and on the web. My “Computing Science” column is titled “Wagering with Zeno”; it returns to a subject mentioned briefly in an earlier column, “Follow the Money.” Consider a random walk on the interval (0,1), where the ... http://bit-player.org/2008/in-zenos-footsteps My new book has come out this week: Group Theory in the Bedroom, and Other Mathematical Diversions, Hill and Wang, xi+269 pages, $25. ISBN-10: 0-8090-5219-9, ISBN-13: 978-0-8090-5219-9, Library of Congress Call Number: T185.H39 2008. This is a collection of essays on themes that will be familiar to many readers of ... http://bit-player.org/2008/hard-covers The interesting thread of comments on Wednesday’s post about “electoral hex” led me to look more closely at the graph for the Lower 48 states: I’ve constructed the graph—and it wasn’t easy, by the way—on the rule that two states are linked by an edge if they share a common boundary ... http://bit-player.org/2008/the-lower-48-graph Democrats here in the U.S. are having quite a primary season. With high hopes of winning the general election in November, we are deadlocked over which candidate to nominate. Should we just wait to let the delegates slug it out at the convention in August? Should the trailing candidate withdraw ... http://bit-player.org/2008/electoral-hex The answer to the question in the headline is: Too many. After I wrote about Sudoku a couple a years ago, I thought I had cured my addiction; but I’ve been a shameless backslider. I return to the subject now, in this public confessional mode, to correct an error in ... http://bit-player.org/2008/how-many-sudokus Zeno of Elea—the philosopher of footraces that never end and arrows that never reach their target—seems a figure so lost in abstractions and infinities that it’s hard to imagine him living in some particular place and time. But Elea was a real town, a sixth-century B.C.E. Greek settlement on the ... http://bit-player.org/2008/veliagate Two recent notes on the Language Log, by Sally Thomason and Mark Liberman, discuss a nutty book, The Secret History of the English Language, by M. J. Harper. I haven’t read the book, but according to the Language Loggers, Harper contends that everybody has the history of European languages totally ... http://bit-player.org/2008/the-linguistic-arrow-of-time Leslie G. Valiant, whose work on holographic algorithms was the subject of a recent column in American Scientist and a brief note here on bit-player, has won the 2008 EATCS Award of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. In addition to the work on holographic algorithms, the EATCS cites ... http://bit-player.org/2008/eatcs-award-to-valiant Ages ago (in blog years) I mentioned some algorithmic ideas for getting passengers aboard airplanes faster, based on a 2005 paper by Steven Skiena and others. Since then, the queue at the departure gate has only gotten longer. Now another preprint on the same theme has landed in the arXiv. ... http://bit-player.org/2008/get-on-board Very likely you already know how to count, but let’s review anyway. The usual counting sequence for the natural numbers starts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, … and goes on for quite some time. Some people prefer to start 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, …, but they wind ... http://bit-player.org/2008/the-end-of-the-number-line I often use a computer to create graphics, but there was a time when I used graphics to compute. That era came back to me the other day in the library. I was browsing among dusty volumes in the folio section when I came upon this: The Design of Diagrams for ... http://bit-player.org/2008/computing-graphics My friends up north tell me they have quite enough snowflakes already, thank you. Nevertheless, Janko Gravner and David Griffeath are making more. Or, rather, they’re making snowfakes (the word is theirs, not mine): In case there’s any doubt, the image above is not a photograph of a real snowflake; it’s ... http://bit-player.org/2008/snowfakes