Beyond Bézier curves

There is a new feature of Pages and Keynote, not mentioned in any of Apple’s publicity nor in any press coverage I’ve seen, that is really very interesting. Perhaps it will even one day prove to have been revolutionary, in a quiet way.

I hate the Pumping Lemma

I hate the Pumping Lemma for regular languages. It’s a complicated way to express an idea that is fundamentally very simple, and it isn’t even a very good way to prove that a language is not regular.

Here it is, in all its awful majesty: for every regular language L, there exists a positive whole number p such that every string w∈L that has p characters or more can be broken down into three substrings xyz, where y is not the empty string and the total length of xy is at most p, and for every natural number i the string xyⁱz is also in L.

The algebra of Unix command substitution

Shadab Ahmed raised an interesting question. Open a Unix command shell, type : '!!' and press return. Then type : "!!" '!!' and press return. Now repeat the following a few times: press the up arrow, and press return.

“Venn diagram” partitioning

Paddy3118 wrote about partitioning elements in the same way a Venn diagram does. So, if we have sets A, B and C, the partitions are

Linear Logic without Units

My PhD thesis (2007) was available for several years from my web site at the University of Manchester, but since that site was taken down it’s been unavailable. Today’s announcement is that I’ve finally got round to uploading it to GitHub.

Puzzles like Adrift

Quite a few people were surprised by my description of Adrift as a “new game” – even though it was very new at the time – because they had seen similar games or puzzles before.

You can read some of the history on Wikipedia: similar puzzles were posed as early as the 19th century, and more recently Big Duck Games released a nice version called Flow Free for Android and iOS.

This game was the subject of a programming competition at Oxford University last year. The competition was won by Thomas Ahle, with this rather nice program.

Adrift puzzles are a little bit different, though: they’re on an unusual grid – the surface of half a cube, i.e. three square grids connected at the edges – and also there are rocks, squares you’re not allowed to use.

Adrift is NP-complete

There’s a lovely new puzzle game for the iPhone called Adrift. I got it last week when I was in bed with flu, and it’s a fun way to spend a few hours.

The puzzles look like this:

And you solve them by connecting the coloured stars with paths of the same colour:

You can play a few demo levels on the web. This is a very simple example. Some of the more difficult ones are pretty fiendish.

John H Conway and the invention of the filing cabinet

Conway is incredibly untidy. The tables in his room at the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics in Cambridge are heaped high with papers, books, unanswered letters, notes, models, charts, tables, diagrams, dead cups of coffee, and the most amazing assortment of bric-a-brac, which has overflowed most of the floor and all of the chairs, so that it is hard to take more than a pace or two into the room and impossible to sit down. If you can reach the blackboard there is a wide range of coloured chalk, but no space to write. His room in college is in a similar state. In spite of his excellent memory he often fails to find the piece of paper with the important result that he discovered some days before, and which is recorded nowhere else. Even Conway came to see that this was not a desirable state of affairs, and he set to work designing and drawing plans for a device which might induce some order amongst the chaos. He was about to take his idea to someone to get it implemented, when he realised that just what he wanted was standing, empty, in the corner of his room. Conway had invented the filing cabinet!

Richard K Guy on John H Conway, in Mathematical People

I originally posted this to Posterous on 27 October, 2012. Posterous is closing down, so I have migrated it here on 13 March, 2013.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a game, but a game that seems to bear lessons for the conduct of human affairs more generally, and it has attracted a great deal of attention from men not noted for their frivolity. It was discovered in 1950 at the RAND corporation, a military think-tank established after World War II by the United States Air Force to conduct a “program of study and research on the broad subject of intercontinental warfare”.

photo: DenisNata / Shutterstock.com

So it is a serious game, but a simple one for all that. It requires two players, let’s say you and me. There is only one move. Each of us must make a choice, to “cooperate” or “defect”, without knowing what the other has chosen. Perhaps each of us takes, from a chess board, one black and one white pawn, and as we face each other I put my hands behind my back and proffer a closed fist containing the pawn I have chosen. You make your choice, too, in the same way. Together we open our hands, and reveal what we have chosen. The black pawn represents the black heart of the defector, the white the innocence of the cooperator.

Now, the reckoning. Should we each reveal a white pawn, we have cooperated and each of us wins £20: a fair and happy outcome. If we both are blackhearts with black pawns in our hands, we win nothing. But wickedness is not without its rewards in this game, for if I hold black and you white then I win £40 – and you, looking sadly at the white pawn in your hand, must pay £10 for your naivety.

Cartograms and the Carbon Map

Last night I gave a talk at geomobLDN about the carbon map project. Here are a few relevant links and tidbits.