3D noughts and crosses

Posted on by phil Posted in fun stuff, hacks — No Comments ↓

Old-school computer (Javier Carcamo, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Long ago (back in the 80’s), my school had a couple of Research Machines 380Z computers for us to play around on. These things had about as much processing power as your average modern-day wristwatch, but were great fun nonetheless. In particular, I remember spending a lot of time playing a 3D noughts and crosses* game that was quite tricky to beat despite being programmed in BASIC.

More recently, I discovered that the entire contents of the floppy disk containing this game (plus a bunch of other demo programs) can be downloaded from rml380z.org. Since I don’t have a 380Z to run this software, I decided to resurrect the code by porting it to C.

You can now try it out yourself via telnet. Just follow this link. If that doesn’t work, open a command line terminal and type in the following:

telnet justmyl.uk 20312

(If you’re using Windows and you need help getting telnet working, try asking Google.)

Here’s a link to the original BASIC program.

* Or “tic tac toe”, if you must.

Footnote: In 1980, a computer scientist called Oren Patashnik used 1500 hours of computer time to prove that there is a perfect winning strategy for the first player in 4×4×4 noughts and crosses. But don’t worry; the 380Z game isn’t quite that sophisticated.

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3D panoramas from Mars

Posted on by phil Posted in fun stuff — No Comments ↓

Flickr user Moe_Ali has been using photos taken by the Curiosity Rover to create 3D images that work with red-blue 3D goggles. They’re really quite good, but don’t bother trying to view the example shown below; click through to the original high resolution images on Flickr and get your ass to Mars.

Mars Curiosity Rover - 3D Panorama - Sol 709

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The mathematical arse

Posted on by phil Posted in fun stuff, graphics, StackExchange — No Comments ↓

Stack Exchange user mikuszefski has come up with a parametric formula for plotting rather nice arses in three dimensions. Take a look at this:

buttocks

Apparently it doesn’t look so good from the other side, but I don’t have Mathematica so am unable to verify. Here’s the formula:

buttock formula

(Images licensed under cc by-sa 3.0.)

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Solution to the Turing competition

Posted on by phil Posted in cryptography — 2 Comments ↓

Last month I mentioned a codebreaking puzzle tied in with the release of the new film about Alan Turing. The competition has just closed, but you might still be able to find it online if you feel like having a go.

If you want to know how to solve the puzzle, read on…

Read more ›

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Breaking a robot out of jail

Posted on by phil Posted in fun stuff, youtube — No Comments ↓

A company called Double Robotics makes “telepresence robots”, which are basically mobile iPads that remote workers can use to give themselves a “virtual presence” in an office many miles away.

Their website includes a “test drive” feature where you can control one of these things through your own web browser. The test drive robot is normally confined to a single room, but someone figured out how to open the door with it and escape.

This whole story may just be a marketing ploy by Double Robotics, but it’s very entertaining.

Experiment 60713/B

Posted on by phil Posted in youtube — No Comments ↓

This was the runner-up in the DepicT! short film competition back in 1999. I think it deserves another airing :-)

It was made by Tom Baxandall and Alan Gardener. Tom went into advertising, and appears to have made several ads with a similar theme, like this one for cranberry juice. I have no idea what became of Alan. Found him: alangardner.co.uk


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Turing competition

Posted on by phil Posted in cryptography, fun stuff — 15 Comments ↓

The maths department at Manchester University recently launched a new competition tied in with the release of The Imitation Game, the film about Alan Turing that you have no doubt heard of.

The competition involves decrypting three codes. I thought it was quite fun, if not particularly difficult. Here’s the link.

A new trailer for the film came out a couple of weeks ago. I’m quite looking forward to this. Hope it doesn’t disappoint.

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Circle of Abstract Ritual

Posted on by phil Posted in youtube — No Comments ↓

According to the blurb, this film by Jeff Frost took 300,000 photos, riots, wildfires, paintings in abandoned houses, two years and zero graphics to make.

It was definitely worth it.

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A stained glass puzzle

Posted on by phil Posted in fun stuff — No Comments ↓
Chaos and Order

Photo by MattClarke @ StackExchange, cc by-sa 3.0

Here’s an interesting puzzle set by user MattClarke at the Stack Exchange puzzling website. The stained glass window you see here is called Chaos and Order. You simply have to figure out why.

I found the answer to this yesterday, but don’t go peeking before you’ve had a crack at it yourself!

If you’re really stuck, try looking for a link to the answer at the end of this sentence. It’s there somewhere.

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Frack off, it’s none of your business

Posted on by phil Posted in rant — No Comments ↓

Earlier this year, the UK government published a report on the effect of shale gas mining (i.e. “fracking”) on rural economies (link to PDF document). One can only assume that their findings were not very positive, because most of this document has been censored, and they’re not telling us why. Even the author’s name has been replaced with the word REDACTED.

For example, here is section 4 of the document, in its entirety:

Section 4: Conclusion

This report has examined the potential economic, social and environmental impacts that are likely to be associated with an expansion in shale gas exploration. REDACTED

To a large extent these effects are already experienced by those rural communities located near established extraction activities e.g. quarrying, mining and conventional gas extraction.

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Current proposals from both government and operators appear to be following a similar approach. Under the commitments of the UK Onshore Operators’ Group (2013), shale gas exploration could provide a community contribution of £100,000 per hydraulically fractured site as an initial benefit, equivalent to total UK payments of between £3 and £12 million. Meanwhile, the government recently announced that English councils which give the go-ahead to shale gas developments will be allowed to keep 100 per cent of the business rates they collect from consented sites. This is estimated to be worth up to £1.7m a year for a typical site.

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I was fairly ambivalent about fracking before I saw this, but now its quite clear that the people behind it are a bunch of faceless REDACTED who have got Whitehall stuck so far up their REDACTED that they can’t even REDACTED REDACTED

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(via UsVsTh3m)

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