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My mom told me a story about going to the circus when she was a kid.

She was very excited, because one of the acts was a Trained Rhino!

Is cyberpunk 25-year olds with brain implants, standing on a downtown streetcorner in the rain, trenchcoat pulled close against the chill, smoking a nootropic cigarette?

Summer, 2019, before the pandemic.

I was working in a “open plan” office, albeit a very pleasant one in downtown Denver.

A Museum You Should Visit

You should make the trip to Thermopolis, WY to visit the Wyoming Dinosaur Center This museum has the most mounted skeletons of Mesozoic vertebrates I’ve seen in a single institution, plus many more interesting fossils or casts.

Wyoming Dinosaur Center has some great Paleozoic material. There’s a placoderm and ostracoderm exhibit, covering important taxa that you don’t see exhibited often. The Center has two Dunkleosteus armored skulls, both different than the cast on display at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

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.

Once, I met Scott Carpenter, one of the Original 7 Astronauts.

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”.

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?

I got an ad that featured this disturbing image.