Category Archives: Uncategorized

Lovelace hackathon: results

Posted on February 5, 2016 by apgoucher

In the previous post, I mentioned the hackathon we were organising to celebrate the 200th birthday of Ada Lovelace. The event was a huge success, and it is safe to say that all attendees had a most enjoyable, creative and … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Ada Lovelace Day: 10th December 2015

Posted on December 1, 2015 by apgoucher

After several months of planning, I would like to announce that there will indeed be an event in Cambridge to celebrate the 200th birthday of Ada Lovelace (10th December 2015): http://www.cambridgelovelace.org/ The organising committee is composed entirely of volunteers, so … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Superflip composed with fourspot

Posted on September 25, 2015 by apgoucher

Somehow, it slipped past my radar that Tomas Rokicki and Morley Davidson have established the maximum number of quarter-turns necessary to solve a Rubik’s cube (the more widely-popularised figure of 20 was for the half-turn metric). That is to say, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Coverings, convolutions and Corbynatorics

Posted on September 14, 2015 by apgoucher

Amidst Saturday’s turmoil, the following problem came into consideration: There are plans to build a nuclear power station on an initially empty 12-by-12 chessboard. Doing so would require an empty 4-by-3 or 3-by-4 rectangular region of squares. To foil this … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

∂ eclipse

Posted on March 20, 2015 by apgoucher

There was a solar eclipse today. Certain regions (including the Faroe Islands, familiar to anyone who has listened to the Shipping Forecast) landed in the umbra, experiencing a total eclipse. I was slightly less fortunate, landing in the penumbra (thereby … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Proto-Penrose tilings

Posted on February 19, 2015 by apgoucher

A while ago, Roger Penrose famously filed a lawsuit against Kimberly Clark when his wife discovered that a roll of quilted lavatory paper was adorned with his aperiodic tiling. Although the tiling occurs naturally in quasicrystals, Penrose was probably the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Holyhedron update

Posted on November 10, 2014 by apgoucher

A while ago, I mentioned the concept of holyhedra: polyhedra, all of whose faces are multiply-connected. The first known example had 78 585 627 faces, and was later superseded by a highly symmetric example with as few as 492 faces. … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Ménage primes

Posted on October 31, 2014 by apgoucher

The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences has recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, amassed over 250 000 sequences of varying importance, and heralded the 75th birthday of its creator Neil Sloane. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that no-one appears to have … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Random circular mazes

Posted on October 29, 2014 by apgoucher

In 1995, William Jockush, Peter Shor and James Propp published the statement and proof of the celebrated Arctic Circle Theorem. This roughly states that if you choose a random domino tiling of an Aztec diamond (a particular family of polyominoes), … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Tributes to cryptanalysts

Posted on September 12, 2014 by apgoucher

Earlier on cp4space, I mentioned how there were a couple of planned tributes to Alan Turing and Bill Tutte. Subsequently, both of these projects have since been completed. Firstly, the premiere of A Man From The Future was performed by the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment