Rope, RoboRally, and Rice Residents
Feb. 4th, 2008 04:17 pmEr, I mean, no, I'm not Scooby Doo...
Let's go in backwards order. I remember Colin asking some time ago about how far back the pattern - or maybe he said "tradition" of Tufts House male president, female VP goes. "Twice is a tradition, three times is an ancient and honored tradition", eh? But I don't think this is really much of a pattern. This year we have Colin and Eve, last year we had Mark and Ginny, but the year before that, under Sean, we had a different vice president each quarter - first Jack, then Chris, then Mark. Of course, it's pretty unlikely we'll change the VP at all this year - the job has almost entirely disappeared. Someone (probably Laura, or maybe Bill or Dave) came up with the idea of making people sign up to bring food for house meeting weeks in advance, at the very first house meeting, and I don't think I've seen since first year a house meeting where we shouted at the VP for not doing his job. (Because, first year, that was really what he was there for. Not that we'd shout at Ginny.)
We played RoboRally again on Saturday; after the easy map last time, we tried one that turned out to be too hard. Or, the second flag was - lesson we quickly learned: harder flags should come later. And there should be a flag on the starting board. The result was that hardly anyone got a register locked all game. (Especially in combination with what we tried for options - that you get one for tagging a flag. Maybe next time we'll try the new edition rules for options, and just try to use boards with more accessible double-wrenches.) (Meanwhile, Noah is trying once again to organize a game of Diplomacy, now that Youlian has brought it - we'll see if that ever actually happens.)
Addendum 19:14: Also, here's something strange. Marissa was playing - I decided to go ahead and play anyway - and she didn't ruin the game! She wasn't a horrible sport! She did try to be nice to the other players (in-game), which suggests something wrong with her idea of it (she wasn't trying to bargain - could you play RoboRally diplomatically? - just being nice), and she was still annoying, but she didn't complain when she narrowly lost. And you know what, I think it's demonstrative of the more general fact that since the start of the year, Marissa has actually become largely tolerable! Still pretty annoying, but for her, this is a big step up.
So, the rope problem. This is another "Harry solves a math problem the stupid way" story (and a tale of many miscalculations). Youlian gives me the following problem, telling me there's a very simple solution: You've got n pieces of rope, and you randomly pair up the 2n ends, to get some number of loops of rope. What's the expected number of components?
( Story cut for those who want to try the problem )
-Harry
Let's go in backwards order. I remember Colin asking some time ago about how far back the pattern - or maybe he said "tradition" of Tufts House male president, female VP goes. "Twice is a tradition, three times is an ancient and honored tradition", eh? But I don't think this is really much of a pattern. This year we have Colin and Eve, last year we had Mark and Ginny, but the year before that, under Sean, we had a different vice president each quarter - first Jack, then Chris, then Mark. Of course, it's pretty unlikely we'll change the VP at all this year - the job has almost entirely disappeared. Someone (probably Laura, or maybe Bill or Dave) came up with the idea of making people sign up to bring food for house meeting weeks in advance, at the very first house meeting, and I don't think I've seen since first year a house meeting where we shouted at the VP for not doing his job. (Because, first year, that was really what he was there for. Not that we'd shout at Ginny.)
We played RoboRally again on Saturday; after the easy map last time, we tried one that turned out to be too hard. Or, the second flag was - lesson we quickly learned: harder flags should come later. And there should be a flag on the starting board. The result was that hardly anyone got a register locked all game. (Especially in combination with what we tried for options - that you get one for tagging a flag. Maybe next time we'll try the new edition rules for options, and just try to use boards with more accessible double-wrenches.) (Meanwhile, Noah is trying once again to organize a game of Diplomacy, now that Youlian has brought it - we'll see if that ever actually happens.)
Addendum 19:14: Also, here's something strange. Marissa was playing - I decided to go ahead and play anyway - and she didn't ruin the game! She wasn't a horrible sport! She did try to be nice to the other players (in-game), which suggests something wrong with her idea of it (she wasn't trying to bargain - could you play RoboRally diplomatically? - just being nice), and she was still annoying, but she didn't complain when she narrowly lost. And you know what, I think it's demonstrative of the more general fact that since the start of the year, Marissa has actually become largely tolerable! Still pretty annoying, but for her, this is a big step up.
So, the rope problem. This is another "Harry solves a math problem the stupid way" story (and a tale of many miscalculations). Youlian gives me the following problem, telling me there's a very simple solution: You've got n pieces of rope, and you randomly pair up the 2n ends, to get some number of loops of rope. What's the expected number of components?
( Story cut for those who want to try the problem )
-Harry
