Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 50 of Puzzlebomb, for February 2012, can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 50 – February 2016 The solutions to Issue 50 can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 50 – February 2016 – Solutions Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found at Puzzlebomb.co.uk.
Relatively Prime Recap: Season 2, Episode 4: Diegetic Plots, Chapter 1
On top of the usual disclosures, I should add that Dave Gale and I interviewed Samuel Hansen this week for our Wrong, But Useful podcast, which you might like to listen to for a deeper insight into Samuel’s brain. During the conversation, he warned me I wouldn’t like Episode 4 of the new Relatively Prime,…
Review: Pythagoria
Pythagoria is a puzzle game for PCs. It’s the same idea as Naoki Inaba’s Area Maze: you’re shown a geometric construction, not drawn to scale, and you have to work out a missing length or an area. Each puzzle is constructed so that it can be solved without ever dealing with fractions, though what exactly that means is…
Learning to play Go: computer edition
In a remarkable example of us being psychic (or, what’s also known as ‘a coincidence’), our recently posted introduction to the game of Go has been made more topical by actual Go-related news. The game of Go has long been considered a difficult game for artificial intelligences to play – much more so than chess, which has plenty of…
Learning to play Go
We bumped into Robert at the last MathsJam conference. He spoke so enthusiastically about Go, and how easy it is to get started, that we asked him if he could write a guide for someone who wants to get into the game. Here it is! This article is designed for those who want to learn Go or read…
The Aperiodical’s Actual Snowflake Competition – Results
Before Christmas, we launched a winter-themed maths competition – to design a sensible hexagonal snowflake, using a square grid, which could be used to knit a wintery jumper and not a) look terrible or b) have non-hexagonal symmetry. We had a deluge of entries, some valid and others less so – in fact, we may have…
New Mersenne prime discovered, and promptly printed out
Breaking news! On 19th January 2016, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search discovered a new largest prime number – we know 49 Mersenne primes, the largest of which is now $2^{74207281}-1$, a number containing over 22 million digits and full of primey goodness. Internet Maths Person Matt Parker has responded to the news in spectacular style,…