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Smullyan's clever solutions

Bruce Ediger

In my post about Raymond Smullyan’s Og and Bog puzzle, I wrote:

Smullyan has a clever solution in the back of Logical Labyrinths, but I’m going to whittle the puzzle down to a size I can hold in my head, because I like procedures to solve puzzles. Having a procedure keeps me from making mistakes, and developing the procedure helps me understand the underpinnings of all problems.

I thought of something that makes Smullyan smarter than I believed.

Trolling Nextdoor

Trolling Nextdoor

Bruce Ediger

For a while in 2017 and 2018, I did some trolling on Nextdoor.com.

If you’re not familiar with Nextdoor, it’s a social network where your membership in various groups is based on your residence’s address. You can only see posts in your “neighborhood” and surrounding “neighborhoods”.

Nextdoor’s contents have been described as “stray cats and racism”.

Algorithmic Squava Players

Bruce Ediger

squava game in progress

I have four algorithms in my second attempt at writing algorithmic “players” for the game of Squava:

  1. Alpha-beta minimaxing
  2. Alpha-beta minimaxing with a better static evaluation function
  3. Monte Carlo Tree Search
  4. Monte Carlo Tree Search with UCT child selection

At this point, all but plain MCTS (#3 above) regularly beat me. How do my programmatic squava players do against each other?

Algorithmic players Elo ratings

New Pet

Bruce Ediger

The Ediger family has a new pet!

I’d like every one to welcome…

Well Digging

Bruce Ediger

When I was maybe 11, some folks bought the hillside north of my parents’ house. The head of this new household, named Monte, had a 1940s bulldozer. He carved out the hillside to create a flat zone, maybe half an acre, for their house.

As part of putting in a dwelling, Monte and some friends and/or relatives dug a well in that flat zone.