Project Euler

I've found a fun new site. Project Euler is a huge set of math+programming puzzles of increasing difficulty, starting out pretty easy (solved by tens of thousands of participants) and going up to puzzles that haven't been solved yet.

They're quite fun. Each one touches some aspect of mathematics, and requires some programming smarts to get it working. But don't worry if you're not cluey on maths. They start out fairly simple, and you can google for information about the math behind the puzzles if you need more.

Each puzzle has a specific, numerical answer. You submit the answer to prove you've solved the puzzle, and the site keeps track of how many you've done. It also gives you access to a forum for each puzzle - where others share their code or insights into how to make the program more efficient. Most puzzles also come with a short pdf to explain the maths behind it - generally showing you how to analyse the problem or prove the formulae behind the most efficient algorithm.

Each puzzle has been constructed so that the correct program/solution is expected to run in under a minute... and for many of the puzzles - that means you'll have to rethink how your program works to get in under that time.

Anyway, I think it's an interesting challenge to play with. Here's my score so far:

Designing serious games - a request for help

I've been hanging out a lot on Less Wrong, which is a community for people trying learn about being more rational.

Some of us are also programmers... so we've decided to get together and have a hackday (in London). But we're still trying to figure out what would be both cool/interesting *and* help us build our rationality, *and* still be doable by an odd collection of random hackers over a single day.

One idea would be to have a go at designing serious games - games specifically created for improving our rationality, a bit like Lumosity builds games for improving mental agility.

But we need help coming up with ideas. Ideas that are not only small enough to fit into the time-schedule of a hackday... but that also demonstrably improve some aspect of our rationality.

If you have any ideas (or would be able to comment on those we've got), come over to our site and add our comments to the Designing serious games discussion.

Thanks

Dosbox and old games

So... my favourite game of all-time is still X-Com: terror the deep. I've been playing it off-and-on now since it first came out 15 years ago.

It is a game with extraordinarily long game-play time. Come to think of it, I think I still haven't actually completed a game yet... it takes months of gameplay to complete... but it's still fun enough that I like to play it anyway.

Now, the thing is, it's a really old game now - it's a DOS game that was able to be played on the then-new Win95... but it hasn't transferred well up the line. I've had to keep around an old laptop for the precise (and only) purpose of playing this game.

For obvious reasons (including the bulk of said ancient laptop), I did not bring that laptop with me to the UK. Which means that I've been deprived of my favourite game for some time.

Lately, however, I learned of Dosbox - which I can now rightly praise as an awesome DOS emulator that actually works on Linux (as well as other, lesser O/Ss). ;)

I had some issues with getting the game to play and save - before realising that I hadn't properly "installed" the game before trying to play it straight of the CD - and thus it didn't have write-privileges, causing it to fail to save a game... or to write the sound-file etc.

but after I figured that out - it's worked just fine. Awesome!