Tuesday, July 31, 2007

beautiful camel

The common knowledge problem with the hats today assumes that everyone in the game is infinitely intelligent, i.e. they all play completely logically. This reminded me of another "infinitely intelligent" problem I heard once. It's about pirates.

-----------------------
Five infinitely intelligent pirates steal a chest with 100 gold coins. Coins cannot be cut or otherwise divided. To divvy up the coins, they use this strategy: the oldest of the five purposes a distribution of the coins, then each votes. If more than half of them approve, they divvy up the coins and are done. Otherwise, the oldest is killed and the next oldest gets to purpose how to distribute the coins following the same rules.

What should the oldest purpose in order to get the most coins possible (or not die).
-----------------------

There's another one about a camel and bananas, but I can't remember it all just now.

So the title of today's post is from a French song I never heard about a beautiful camel.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Teams

Hey everyone,

When you have your team names, logos, and team blurbs (or slogans or whatever), post them as a comment to this post.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft.

Currently in Joe's talk. Some of this conversation reminded me of this image I was on apod (Astronomy Picture of the Day) a while back.


This is just page 1.
See if you can figure it out. I got too impatient when i first saw it and looked up the answer (linked from this apod archive). Check it out. I think you'll like it.

"Calling occupants of interplanetary craft" is the title for this post. It comes from a cheesy but cute Carpenters song.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Painting

I'm putting this post in so you have a place to post links to images you want to paint. I need to print color copies of them. Try to pick a scene from a cartoon that's fairly simple, without too many colors or a zillion objects.

Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?

'Bout time I updated, eh? I spent most of the week preparing for the AI lesson, and had planned to update Friday, but time has a way of disappearing.

I had a lot of fun preparing for and teaching about AI. I guess that's why I'm in grad school: research -- in my or other areas -- is so amazing. These great projects that people (and sometimes people I know!) are working on are years aware from hitting the market, but there's so much promise. Even if they're not perfect yet, we can see all sorts of things humans are capable of. How could that not excite you?

And this brings us to the title of this post. It's from a Billy Bragg song about lost love where he wishes on a star but then realizes it's a satellite and asks . The line made me think of HAL from 2001, who can certainly be considered "space hardware."

Sunday, if we can work out some timing issues, I'll be teaching a painting class. I'll admit that I'm a little nervous. I've only ever taught math and science topics before. I'm sure it'll be fun for everyone at very least, since painting is a blast, it's just in my nature to worry.

I couldn't come up with a relevant picture, so here's one of my kitty, Tristan.

Monday, July 9, 2007

I don't care if Monday's blue

Day one, unless you count Sunday. Starting to learn students' names. I'll probably forget a lot of them over night.

Tomorrow is the Beyond Media Computing Thread's first meeting. We were planning it today and I'm really looking forward to it. This is (I think) the third iteration of this lesson, so it has improved with each cosmos in the past. Should be cool.


This is a picture is Robert Smith of The Cure. The title of this entry comes from their song "Friday I'm in Love".