OddThinking

One of my hobbies is explaining to non-Australians the meaning behind Australian holidays.

Alphametics (aka verbal arithmetic, cryptarithmetic and others) puzzles are an old puzzle where letters are substituted for numbers in simple equations. Go search for alphametics for lots of examples.

These puzzles never really captured my fancy, which is, weirdly enough, why I recently implemented a “puzzle helper” to help solve them.

Did you ever notice that some people (all people?) have certain phrases that they use a disproportionately high percentage of the time?

You may find in infuriating or endearing – probably depending on what you think of the person anyway.

I was wondering what my commonly-repeated phrases might be.

Then I realised I had a large corpus of my writing on this blog, and I may be able to do an experiment to find out.

The blogosphere tilted on its axis slightly last week when Donald Knuth had a birthday, and every Computer Science geek rushed to provide a tribute.

In this article, I describe how I wrote some software to tackle the Slitherlinks puzzles.

My doctor’s bookshelf is rated PG.

The Compact Monthly Archive (CMA) Widget has just been released at 1.0.

This widget has been on the sidebar on the left of OddThinking for 9 months, but now it is available for you own WordPress blog.

This article focuses on that message-passing system and the variants I have tried in the puzzle-solving architecture that has evolved over a number of pet projects.

This article includes some Slitherlinks tips for players who understand the basics and want to tackle the medium and hard examples.