Primo, a board game which puts the ‘fun’ in the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, has now been successfully funded via Kickstarter. In a recent blog post, the creators Katherine Cook and Daniel Finkel boast:
The game plays beautifully in play test after play test. It’s one of the most mathematically rich games we have ever seen, and at the same time avoids that icky “educational game” feel. Primo is a real game and it’s worth playing because it’s fun. Really fun.
Yet another fun toy for you. Give a computer a set of tiles defined by what their edges look like, can you fit them together? That problem is undecidable, since you can encode Turing machines as sets of tiles, but it turns out it’s fun to watch a computer try.
Ghost Diagrams asks you for a set of tiles (or it’ll make some up if you didn’t bring one) and shows you its attempts to make them fit together. It’s very pretty, and quite mesmerising. Sometimes it looks even better when you turn on the “knotwork” option.
Paul Harrison created Ghost Diagrams while writing his PhD thesis, Image Texture Tools: Texture Synthesis, Texture Transfer, and Plausible Restoration. He’s written a short blog post about the program.
Here are a few patterns I liked: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
via John Baez on Google+.
This is a fun game to while away the midweek blues. You’re presented with two dots. You can drag between dots to create lines and circles, as if you had a straightedge and compass. Apart from a few challenges to get you thinking, that’s pretty much it!
The game was created by Nico Disseldorp, who has a few more fun things on his website, Science vs Magic.
Play: ANCIENT GREEK GEOMETRY
I get the Tyne & Wear Metro in and out of work every day. When I don’t have a quality periodical to peruse, I like to play games on my phone. I’ve found a few really good games for my phone that also exercise my maths muscle recently, so I thought I’d write a post about them to share the fun, and prompt you to recommend even more.
Since I’ve got an Android phone, I’m no doubt missing some fantastic games on iOS, but lots of apps these days have versions for both big platforms. I’m also giving UK prices; prices in your country are likely the same numbers with different symbols in front.
We’ve been quietly making plans and gathering material for a new project over the past couple of weeks, after noticing that there’s an unusual paucity of maths podcasts at the moment. Well, that exciting new project is now happening, and it’s a half-hour podcast featuring maths, guests, puzzles and links from the internet. It’s called All Squared, and it’ll contain cringe-inducing intro/ending contrivances, interesting guest interviews on topical and other subjects, and a panoply of mathematical curiosities.
This is the first number of the podcast (we thought ‘episode’ would set unrealistic expectations of regularity, and we can never resist a pun). It includes an interview with Edmund Harriss about spoken mathematics, as well as a puzzle which we’ll give the answer to in the next number, and a great mathematical flash game to keep you occupied until that appears.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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You may have thought Angry Birds is a waste of time. Information Week are reporting that the new Angry Birds Space game was “developed in collaboration with NASA through a Space Act Agreement”, a kind of commercial partnership NASA has used for “more than 50 years”. The article explains:
NASA seized on Angry Birds Space as an opportunity to educate the public on the law of physics that’s fundamental to everything it does: gravity. On NASA.gov, it used the occasion to explain the difference between normal gravity ($1g$), zero gravity ($0g$), and microgravity ($1 \times 10^{-6} g$), and to point out that experiments on the International Space Station happen in a microgravity environment. In a video demo of what that looks like in practice, astronaut Don Pettitt used a slingshot to catapult an Angry Bird across the interior of the Space Station.
The article outlines a series of experiments NASA will be undertaking in microgravity, though really the game is an outreach activity:
NASA hopes that Angry Birds Space will spark kids to take a keener interest in math, physics, and engineering careers… Of course, there’s a gigantic leap from the animated world of flying feathers into the real world of astronomy, aerospace science, and propulsion systems.
Minecraft is a game where you mine and craft. There is a substance called redstone which you can mine, and craft into circuits. Even making simple logic gates is quite finicky. That hasn’t stopped people from trying to make more complicated things like adders.
Somebody has made a scientific calculator with a proper display and a graph plotter.
[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgJfVRhotlQ]
I am agog.