Mens Erger Je Niet

Image via WikipediaMany years ago I had the fortune to play in the White House Junior Invitational in Amsterdam. On one of the nights that we stayed in, we became a bit restless. I had spotted games at the hostel's reception earlier and so went and procured the intriguingly titled Mens Erger Je Niet. At first we were disappointed to find out it was Ludo in another language.

We opened it up, selected colours and laid the pieces in the obvious way. We were about to start playing but realised that nobody was quite sure of the rules. After a brief discussion we came up with the following synergistic cocktail:

Another Everything-Is-Okay Block

The following hand is from the Terence Reese book 'The Most Puzzling Situations in Bridge'.

West leads the K♦ against your 6NT. You have 11 tricks if the spades are breaking with an easily established twelfth in diamonds. How do you play?

OED Conspiracy

On a night out, in the not too distant past, I told a friend what I believed to be the origin for the use of the word 'love' in tennis to represent a no-score. I did point out that I had not verified and, thankfully, he looked it up in the OED. The OED, apparently, points out that 'love' is used not because of an Anglicization of 'l'ouef', which was the common shape of a zero on a scoreboard. Instead, apparently, it is short for 'love of the game'. This sounded ridiculous to me and, based on this, I posited the theory that the OED was attempting to minimize the credit foreigners were given in the development.

Playing Them The Wrong Way Round

Many people are familiar with the tactic of running a long suit to keep control. In my salad days I would have ducked a trump in the following hand. That is fine for teams but now I play a lot more matchpoints.After West leads the AKJ♥, the correct technique is to cash two trumps in the long-trump hand and run the diamonds when the suit does not break. I like to call this play the Everything-Is-Okay Block because I can afford to block this suit if everything is okay.

The Least Efficient Way To Learn

Which of these words begins with the letter 'c'?

a) dog b) cat c) rabbit d)goldfish

In the Human-Computer Interaction Module in college our lecturer talked about a study on how many of the answers to a multiple choice question a respondent would remember. As the amount of processing of the word required to answer increased, the percentage of words recalled by respondents increased.

The question above requires very little processing as you only check the first letter. A step down the ladder would be 'Which of these words is coloured red?'. A step up would be 'Which of these words rhymes with sound?'. At the top of the ladder would be a fill-in-the-blank question, where each word must be considered in the context of the sentence.

Speed Of Lightning Play

Another hand from the Junior Invitational in Beijing. I have often wondered whether I was lucky or good on this hand - not that there is anything wrong with that. I received a diamond lead and, through some rather specious reasoning, decided I would prefer to lose a trick to East. I won the A♦ and led the T♣ from hand. This hit the jackpot when West ducked from ♣Qxx.

I am currently dipping in and out of 'The Rodwell Files'.In the section 'Speed Of Lightning Play', I came across the hand below. East was Fredin from Sweden. When he received the T♥ lead, he reasoned that South probably had awkward holdings in the minors. After the Q♥ won, he came to hand with a diamond and led a low club. South ducked and the hand is routine from there. This is a Speed Of Lightning Play, taking advantage of positions where defenders play low quickly to avoid giving away their holdings in a suit.

After seeing the latter hand, I think maybe I made the correct play on the former hand - albeit for the wrong reasons. Do you think I was lucky or good?

Why I Dropped Mysql For Neo4j

If you would like to run the queries in this post the SQL is available here.

One segment of the Horse Racing Information System I worked on in college involved finding horses from a given race that had raced against each other.

This is the more general example where I have a given horse and wish to find all the horses they have run against:

SELECT h2.horsename
FROM horse h1
JOIN raceentrants r1 ON h1.horseid = r1.horseID
JOIN raceentrants r2 ON r1.raceID = r2.raceID
JOIN horse h2 ON h2.horseid = r2.horseID
WHERE r1.horseID =1
AND h2.horsename NOT
IN (
'Horse A'
);

My representation of the steps involved are:

1. Select the correct horse from the Horse table
2. Join this to the RaceEntrants table on horseId to find all the horse's races
3. Join this to the RaceEntrants table on raceId to find all other entrants in these races
4. Join this to the Horse table to find the other horses
5. Make sure we do not return the original horse

If I really wantd just the names I could have used 'distinct' but it is more likely that in a ful database you would be returning on all horse-race combinations.

This is quite cumbersome but it gets worse ...

Finding Anagrams With Neo4j (Pattern Matching)

In my previous post on this subject I showed how I found anagrams by implementing ReturnableEvaluator. After I finished writing that program, I found this article that included a section on pattern matching. I wrote a method to see how this would work.

Note: the problem I am trying to solve is from horse racing. I cannot currently solve that problem because I do not have the information in a database. This is an analogous problem where the could easily be placed in the database.

Shortshake: Transferring The Ruff

Another play named by Eric Rodwell in the 'The Rodwell Files' and the example is from the Imagination and Technique in Bridge" by Tim Bourke and Martin Hoffman.

West leads the K♠ and East follows with the 2♠ You win the trick and cash the K♦. How do you continue? You have ten tricks with 6♦+2♥+A♠+A♣. If hearts are no worse than 4-2 then you have the entries to establish the hearts. How do you cope with 5-1 hearts?

Depth Charts: Texans @ Ravens

Houston Offence v. Baltimore Defence:

Depth Charts: Giants @ Packers

New York Offence v. Green Bay Defence:

Depth Charts Broncos @ Patriots

Denver Offence v. New England Defence:

Depth Charts: New Orleans @ San Fran

San Francisco Offence v. New Orleans Defence:

Let's Make Some Yoghurt With John Keats

So far this blog has been a bit like milk*, uncultured. So let's add a bit of culture. I want to write about of my favourite poems. It feels lazy to reproduce all of a poem, but I do not see how else to do it.

* I used to say this joke about Yoghurt but apparently milk is uncultured yoghurt.

My first selection is Keats' "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer". Keats composed the poem after a night reading the translation of Homer's Odyssey by George Chapman. This poem reminds of the excitement of finding a new and great* source of enjoyment. For example, when I read the first Morse book and realised there were twelve more to go, or when I recorded seven series of Spooks and was hooked after two episodes.

* I've often heard people make some variation of the joke that the Great Wall Of China isn't that. Merriam-Webster has eleven definitions for the word great and 'used as a generalized term of approval' is eleventh. I learn this from 'the other Homer'. My variation on the joke, while still lame, at least makes sense: "Maybe afterwards we can go see the world's fastest drying paint".

Good Defence From Singapore

b
This defence was easier to find than I first thought. East's 2♣ bid was probably a general game force. West can place him with at most the KQJ♣, QJ♦, and the J♠ outside of hearts. Therefore he must have the A♥ for the 2♣ bid. He still had to find the trumpp switch.

Note if East led the A♥ instead, he must find the diamond switch. Now when south ruffs and leads a spade, West can jump in with the Q♠ to lead another diamond. Dummy only has the K♥ left and thus the Q♥ will be promoted to the setting trick.

This may seem like a very kind hand to display but I have a hand for next week where I called the director on my own partner. He was from the Malay Peninsula and I did not want people thinking I had a bias against that particular area.

NFL Notes: 2011 NFC Wild Card Round

Falcons-Giants:

A disappointing performance from the Atlanta offence. Failing to score in the first round of the playoffs is not what they had in mind when they traded up to select Julio Jones in last years darft. Atlanta punet Matt Bosher averaged close to 50 yards a punt in the first half but the defence could only hold out for so long. The story of the Falcon's season is the failure to convert on fourth-and-one. They had two key efforts here and were stuffed both times on QB sneaks. I would not be impressed with the Atlanta Offensive Co-ordinator this season given the talent they had but Jacksonville obviously saw something

The Giants are still using their Super Bowl 42 game plan but now with their defensive line horses fit and Brandon Jacobs looking really good, he had 92 yards on 14 carries,  it is starting to work again. The big problem next weekend is that, unlike Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers can run from pressure. In this article I said I would start using the coins in the pocket analogy and here we go: I am astounded by how many Giants fans have come to the same conclusion about this weekend's game. Apparently both teams have spectacular offences but the giants are running the ball well and their defensive line is playing at a high level. Ergo the Giants* will win.

* A bit weird but I wrote the joints there the first time no capitalization - the Ney York Football joints.

Expert Shortcake

The shortshake is a play named by Eric Rodwell in the 'The Rodwell Files' and both these examples come from 'The Expert Game' by Terence Reese.

On the first hand South plays in 6♣ after East has made a pre-emptive overcall in spades - probably no Michael's* in those days. West leads the A♠ and continues with a spade. South discarded a diamond and East showed out on the Q&clubs. South turned to diamonds, playing the AK and ruffing the third round. Now they tried to get back to hand by playing A♥ and ruffing - but West over-ruffed.

To avoid this, at trick two, South must discard a low heart on the K♠.

* I am going with the apostrophe against the spelling from all the resources - et tu Wikipedia?

I Am So Tired

Many years ago I read an article, that cited a study, about why Christmas cracker jokes are so poor. I have tried to locate it on line but have had no success. The gist of the article was that in a large group there will be many people with diverse humour. If you tell a joke that some will see as legitimately funny then some people will see it as funny but others will not. Thus, at a Christmas dinner, where you have a group that is usually heterogeneous on age and gender*, legitimate jokes run the risk of causing a schism in that group. When you open a Christmas cracker and tell a legitimately bad joke, everybody can pan it and this enables harmony within the group.

* I would describe humour as social rather than biological so I believe gender to be the appropriate term - but I have been known to be wrong.

More Shortshake, LOL

Another play named by Eric Rodwell in the 'The Rodwell Files' and the example is from the books of Terence Reese.

West leads the Q♦. You play low to presere the K♦ as an entry (and in case East is void). East follows to the diamond but discards on the first round of trumps. You have 11 top tricks but the bad trump break means you will need to develop a trick in either spades or diamonds.

Clarissa (and Alan Potts) Explains Moneyball

I did not watch 'Clarissa Explains It All' when I was young as I did not have Nickelodeon. I do,however, remember seeing lots of ads for it. One of them brought to my attention this very important point: there is a difference between 'John and me' and 'John and I'. I started paying attention to it and it became apparent that correcting  'John and me' to 'John and I'  was a convenient hook for establishing a character's intelligence. Somewhere along the line, however, I noticed that these characters were always correcting 'John and me' to 'John and I'* - even when the latter was correct. This is an overcorrection and it is a sign that somebody does not understand what they have learned or taken the wrong lesson from an example.

*Here is a simple guideline: cover the 'John and' part and decide which word you would choose. 1) I went to the park => John and I went to the park. 2) Is that for me? => Is that for John and me?

Power-Weight Ratio

Image via Wikipedia

I came across this idea in a video of a the Joshua Bloch presentation "How To Design A Good API and Why It Matters". Power is what you can do with the API. Weight is conceptual weight, the number of ideas you have to learn to use an API. We want to do more for less effort.

I have several Maths-related ideas that run along these ideas. The first concerns the terms 'plus' and 'minus'. The main thrust of my idea is to replace minus with opposite (direction) and, for the moment, to replace plus with forward* (direction).

More Shortshake

The shortshake is a play named by Eric Rodwell in the 'The Rodwell Files' and the example from the books of Terence Reese.

West leads the J♠. One trick must be loss to the A♣ and possibly one to the K♦. It looks as though only a ruff threatens the contract. How would you play?

What To Watch Tonight: National Championship Game

LSU plays Alabama tonight in the college football championship game - or maybe its basketball.This is a rematch of a bone-crunching defensive struggle in which LSU prevailed in overtime - after Alabama's Australian kicker had missed four field goals. There is a lot of controversy over the BCS allowing a rematch in the title game but these are the two best teams in the country - even if they won't produce the most aesthetically pleasing game. Nick Saban and Les Miles are two of the best coaches in the game. The latter perhaps at times unconventionally so. Of course the stars will be on the field and in this article Tony Pauline discusses the NFL draft prospects in the game. Of course off the field Alabama already has one major victory over LSU this week.

NFL Notes: 2011 AFC Wild Card Round

Pittsburgh - Denver:


It took longer to explain the new overtime rules than it took to play the overtime itself as Tim Tebow hit Demaryius Thomas on the first play for an 80-yard TD. It was a measure of justification for ex-Broncos Head Coach Josh McDaniels who took both those players in the first round of the 2010 NFL Draft.With perfect timing, it was announced after the game that McDaniels has rejoined Denver's next opponent the New England Patriots.

Finding Anagrams With Neo4j (Returnable Evaluator)

I have a Neo4j database with 128,985 words from The English Open Word List. Each word is stored as 'node' and 'done' are in the video below. The ideas here was not to solve anagrams but to solve a problem where multiple pieces of information had to be found at a node. Here that means does this word have exactly 1 'n', does this word have exactly one 'o', and so forth.

Hands From Ireland-Scotland Camrose Match

The following are some hands from Sunday's Camrose match between Ireland and England: Analysis from the Scotland-England match is available here.

Robson Gaffe:




Just to show that even the best can make the easiest of mistakes. South ducks the spade lead and wins the second round. For his vulnerable 2♠ opening with ♠Q96543, West must have the A♦. Therefore you would think that there is very little to the play. Robson must have seen something else. After one round of clubs he cashed the AQ♥ - blocking the suit! After this there was no recourse.

Happy 65th Birthday David Bowie

When I was 16, at the end of a weekend of bridge training in Dublin, I stopped off in HMV on the walk back to the bus. I had very little money and wasn't feeling well. I had to choose between buying food or buying something to listen to on the bus, in those days the individual lights often failed to work so reading was out. I chose to go with a David Bowie compilation. It was an excellent choice. 'Absolute Beginners' and 'Drive-In Saturday' really hit my sweet spot.

Here are my favourite Bowie songs:

Absolute Beginners:

Hands Of Note From The Scotland-England Camrose Match

The following are some hands from Saturday's Camrose match between Scotland and England:

Costly Non-Costly Lead:



Forrester played in 3NT and North led his fourth highest diamond. Leading the beer card instead of the J♦ has no effect on the play except to complicate defence. South did well to apply the Rule of 11 and played low. Forrester won the A♦ and cashed the AK♣. When he found the bad break he led a low diamond. North did not read his partner's duck and inserted the T♦. Forrester played low from dummy and the defence's goose was cooked. South switched to a heart, won by North who continued with two more rounds, the final one into declarer's AT♥. The fourth round of hearts squeezed North for an overtrick.

Shortshake

Another play named by Eric Rodwell in the 'The Rodwell Files'. The play involves the discard of a non-loser to enable an earlier ruff in the discarded suit. I have located a few more ex libris Terence Reese. I will do one hand per post.

In 4♥ you receive the T♦ lead. If this is a singleton you are probably dead in the water. Can you do anything if it is a doubleton?

Why I Laiku But Others Won't

As part of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving(TRIZ), Genrich Altshuller, by studying patented inventions, came up with five levels of inventiveness, as pictured. I think that he called it the Pyramid of Inventiveness. The idea there being that if every level represents a standard deviation, the distribution is similar to a normal curve. As you can see, however, there are more inventions in level 2 than level 1. The missing inventions* from level 1 often go unpatented due to the following: being of limited usefulness; being treated as suggestions rather than inventions; failure to meet patent requirements.

* I have been looking for a term for missing data in a population. For example, not every country plays rugby or cricket. When you look at the top 100 players in the world, there are people who should be in this list but are not because of a lack of opportunities, or maybe just more lucrative ones like MLB or NFL.


The following summarise in general terms the different levels:

My Favourite Hand

The above hand occurred in the Junior Individual in Beijing 2008. I opened three diamonds first in hand and this was passed around. West opened a top spade and, not wanting to set up dummy's Q whilst dummy had an entry, switched to the the Q♥ - after a lot of thought.

You are on the dummy, how would you continue?

Happy 600th Birthday

600 years ago today, possibly, in the village of Domrémy, Joan of Arc was born to the magnificently named pair of Jacques d'Arc and Isabel Romée. It is one of the remarkable stories* from history. There is much debate about the role she played in battle - was she more important for the morale she or for her tactics. However, during her trial for heresy she displayed great intellect and constantly dumbfounded her inquisitors. 


* Wouldn't a show about someone who uses great intelligence to achieve a position of prominence in an organization be worth watching.


Probably the most famous exchange is the following:

The most famous exchange was the question put to Joan: did she know if she was in God’s grace; to which she replied: “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.”