Our semi-regular pub quiz ends with the jackpot round - one team competes in a luck-driven “higher/lower” card game to win a jackpot (currently c.£500), and if they lose, some more money is added to the jackpot for the following week. I’d never seen anyone win the jackpot - so was curious to work out what the chances actually are and what the optimal strategy (to the extent that there is strategy beyond the obvious) is. The cards are dealt without replacing them in the deck, so the probabilities vary during the game, making it trickier to explicitly calculate the probability of winning. But it is relatively simple to estimate using Monte Carlo simulation - running multiple simulated games, counting the wins, and using that to estimate the win probabilities when applying various strategies. ...

“Scrabble isn’t a word game. It’s an area-control game with 150,000 rules to define legal placement for your resources. Some of those rules have mnemonics in the form of words you know.” The origin of this fair description of Scrabble is traced in a recent Hacker News discussion of the game, prompted by Oliver Roeder’s 2022 article On the Insanity of Being a Scrabble Enthusiast. ...

Earlier in the year we acquired a ukulele. Having played violin years ago, I was impressed by innovations - a digital tuner is much better than the pitch pipes whose pitch varied depending on how hard you blew - I know I should have been able to do it all with an A and an ear…) And I only now learned that the metal bars running across the fingerboard of ukuleles, guitars, etc. don’t just guide the fingers but actually stop the string themselves, making tuning more precise - which set me wondering why I never had frets on my violin… ...

[This post - on Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys when it was still new, my own French and maths education, and comedian Adam Bloom’s narrative maze-hedging - was originally published on LiveJournal on 4 August 2004 and is re-posted here as part of a migration from Livejournal. It has some minor editing, interjections from 2022, and fixing/replacement of broken links - not everywhere has been able to follow Tim Berners-Lee’s 1998-and-still-there advice that Cool URIs don’t change.] ...

[This post - on archives (and their ultimately inconsequential gaps), the mathematical quirks of unexpected hangings and “The Bottle Imp” by Robert Louis Stevenson - was adapted from a post originally published on LiveJournal on 23 March 2004 and is re-posted here as part of a migration from Livejournal. It has some minor editing, interjections from 2022, and fixing/replacement of broken links - not everywhere has been able to follow Tim Berners-Lee’s 1998-and-still-there advice that Cool URIs don’t change.] ...

Over the last couple of years I have been introduced to two card games with a similar theme - co-operating to play numbered cards in an increasing sequence - but with very different approaches. This article considers The Mind, a game of group rapport and intuition, where players must sense the right moment to play their cards. Hanabi, described in Part 1 of this series, is a game of deduction. ...

I was reminded of the delights and challenges of type-in programs from decades past - listings printed in books and magazines for the reader to type in at home - which I suppose could be considered an ultra-low-bandwidth, high-error-rate method of software transmission via the printed page, eyeballs, and fingers - by this tweet about old computer magazines: https://twitter.com/cyb3rops/status/1476122483308875778 ...

In May 2020 I compiled a quiz based on the openings of a variety of books on our bookcases - a mixture of the well-known and the slightly obscure, the literary and the popular, with a dusting of SF/fantasy sprinkled in. I’ve now put together a second quiz, this time on book endings. This page has the book endings but not the answers - there is a version with answers also available. ...

In May 2020 I compiled a quiz based on the openings of a variety of books on our bookcases - a mixture of the well-known and the slightly obscure, the literary and the popular, with a dusting of SF/fantasy sprinkled in. I’ve now put together a second quiz, this time on book endings. This page includes the book closing lines and the answers: there is a spoiler-free version with only the questions also available. ...

Over the last couple of years I have been introduced to two card games with a similar theme - co-operating to play numbered cards in an increasing sequence - but with very different approaches. Hanabi, described in this article (Part 1), is a game of deduction - it echoes classic puzzles featuring multiple logicians reasoning not only about what they know themselves, but what they can deduce about what the others know based on what they say or do. The Mind, on the other hand, is a game of group rapport and intuition, and will be discussed in Part 2 of this article. ...