I'm going up to Running Aces to play their HORSE tournament today and their open-face Chinese tournament tomorrow ( Read more... )

Tintri suffered a server room power outage Monday evening so instead of useful work I prototyped the idea laid out in the previous post!

( Cut in case you don't love data structures. )

In my earlier work on Chinese Poker, I analyzed a hand by comparing it with a sample set of already-organized hands. What I learned was that the vast majority of time was spent identifying which hands from the sample set were valid--- i.e., did not contain any cards from the hand being analyzed. Even with a very fast comparison (xor on bitvectors ( Read more... )

Is there a better way to set either of the following hands ( Read more... )

Yesterday a correspondent asked me about this CP2-7 hand: 23467AAATTKQJ ( Read more... )

timprov says: "It's an interesting abstraction, after your Chinese Poker work. You went from studying a game you don't care about, to a game based on a game you don't care about ( Read more... )

My 2+2 magazine article on setting Chinese Poker w/ 2-7 hands is up: http://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/issue34/Gritter1007.html Thanks again to all who read the article in draft form ( Read more... )

1. Goats has been sort of plotty lately, but today's strip delivers a punchline that caught me completely off guard. (It narrowly beat out Starslip Crisis's over-the-top management joke for top billing.) I also liked PVP's take on Talk Like a Pirate Day. (P.S. Order of the Stick is back from hiatus but the first two strips have been sort of meh ( Read more... )

I went to my first TCLUG (Twin Cities Linux User Group) talk tonight; it was a gentleman from Amazon talking about Amazon web services. The crowd was about 50 people large, with about two females. But fewer beards than expected. Still, a bigger concentration of geekiness than I've seen in a while ( Read more... )

I spent some time yesterday playing around with Dabble DB, which sells itself as a "web database ( Read more... )