thnik again!

I am so busy that I have to eat between meals. – Jan Nordgreen

Creativity: The Mind, Machines, and Mathematics: Public Debate

Two of the sharpest minds in the computing arena spar gamely, but neither scores a knockdown in one of the oldest debates around: whether machines may someday achieve consciousness. (NB: Viewers may wish to brush up on the work of computer pioneer Alan Turing and philosopher John Searle in preparation for this video.)  - More

Remove all red and dark red shapes by clicking on them, keep green shapes on the screen. A game by Gaz Tomas.

Play it here. For me it took a long time to load, but it was well worth the wait.

Enter by the bottom red path and end on the center gray square.

You may retrace your path but may not make a U-turn on a
pathway. You must follow the paths in the order red, blue,
yellow and then red, blue, yellow again, as needed, changing
color on the white squares.

Problem creator: Dave Phillips via mathpuzzle.

What is algebra exactly; is it those three-cornered things? - James Matthew Barrie

- Last night the new neighbour divided us over.
- Isn’t that nice. I wish I had neighbours like that!
- We played a game he had invented.
- A creative guy from what I hear.
- We started with the number one and added to it any of its divisors.
- How many does it have.
- Only one, 1 itself.
- Does he believe his game has commercial possibilities?
- When we got to 2 we repeated the process by adding any of 2′s divisors to it.
- I have read somewhere that 1 and 2 are the only divisors of 2.
- Reading can be useful at times.
- What happened then? Was that the end of it?
- No. We continued to add numbers till he asked us if all numbers below or equal to 16 can be reached in eight or less steps.
- What did you answer?
- That we had to get up early the next morning and that we really had enjoyed meeting him.
- Vuaw!
- When we got home we actually found the answer to his question. What’s more, we proved that any number not greater than 2^(n+1) can be reached in 2^n or less steps.
- Sounds like real useful stuff. I will try to add it to my pizza recipe.

Problem source: MathCamp 2009.

Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes. – Unknown

In which chess game does Red always begin?

Math is like love – a simple idea but it can get complicated. – Unknown

The other day I went for a three and a half hour hike in the wilderness with my boss alone. In any continuous one-hour period during our hike we covered exactly 2 km.

How many people went on the hike? How long was it?

Problem source: MathCamp 2009 via mathpuzzle.