As people from Ljubljana know, Saturday is a great day for a picnic in Mostec. Especially if it’s Saturday the 8th of July. Should you be there around 11 am (and/or a few hours after that), you might even see some people playing Go as a bonus! Go players usually like to teach very much (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).
Aah, dice really get me all mushy inside (probably a residue of my temporarily abandoned D&D 'career'). Especially if I think about a bunch of them in my hand, powering up for a nifty sneak attack of straight sixes. All the more so when they are round and cute like that.
God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.
(Terry Pratchett, Good Omens)
Sounds like our DM(s), all right.
D&D gone statistical:
I went to a go tournament and lived. Five games, 30 minutes per player per game, handicap -2 and a pizza. As expected I lost all but one of them (the one I didn’t play due to the odd number of players), which is no wonder considering I was by far the weakest player (a mere 17 kyu with approximately zilch experience). But I got an award for the best (only) female participant. A more extensive report is on the way, some other day.
Sunburnt. Exhausted. Off to sleep.
My little brother is deeply engrossed in ‘training’ for the upcoming IOI in Mexico, which is keeping me thoroughly amused. He is constantly coming up with (sometimes rather funny) questions concerning practice tasks, which range from trivial to outright unsolvable – the cause for the latter mainly being his appropriately forgetting to mention a minor detail (or two, or three, …) and thus generalizing the problem way over my head.
The cherry on top of all those inquiries was the inverse factorial. After establishing that what he probably meant was Euler’s gamma function, the hunt began. Obviously the inverse exists at least on a well-chosen domain, which basicaly says nothing. Therefore, Google to the rescue. I should have known that it is logical that the inverse of the factorial function, ‘!’, would be ‘?’, resulting in
meaningful identities like:
9! = 362880
362880? = 9
9?! = 9
362880?!?!?? = 9
3! = 6 = 720?
1! = 1? = 1?!??!?!!?(Halfbakery, Inverse Factorial ‘?’)
A slightly more serious answer: InverseGammaRegularized (a Mathematica function). Way too much trouble to do it properly.
Yesterday at a local Go club I played a speed go game (8 handicap stones against a 8k on KGS) in preparation for saturday’s tournament . It was a very exciting game from beginning to end, partly due to some blundering on both sides and the not-so-serious atmosphere. The result of the first sloppy counting: Black has 28 points against 27 for White. Victory, however, was not meant to be mine – lo and behold, a lonely and forgotten point in the middle of the board for White. Jigo!
