Art imitates life
05.04.06 3:15 PM


By dplass
TopCoder Member

Yesterday after the NSA talk (check out davidyang's excellent blog entry for details) the "game room" was opened. They had Monopoly, Scrabble, chess, and a bunch of other games. I watched SnapDragon and reid play a curious game with a magnetic sphere whereby the players had to alternate placing hexagonal or pentagonal pieces around the sphere. Each piece formed the surface of the sphere, and the goal was to be the last player to place a piece on the sphere. The catch was that it was illegal for two pieces of the same color to touch edges. (A kink in the rules seemed to allow a vertex of a piece to touch an edge of another piece of the same color, which of course occurred.)

The point of my story, and I do have one, is that later last night I started reading a book by one of my favorite Sci-fi authors, Roger McBride Allen, called The Depths of Time.

In the opening gambit, a group of six bogeys appear out of a wormhole and start dispersing away. After the good guys who were guarding the wormhole killed one of them, their sensors were overloaded and they lost track of the other five. The junior watch officer found the second one on a straight line trajectory away from the worm hole. She deduced that they were traveling away from the wormhole in a regular pattern, and based on the tracks of the first two targets, she used five-sided and six-sided pyramids in three dimensions to predict where the other targets had gone. This reminded me of the game I had seen the guys playing in the game room earlier. Art imitates life!

That's all for now, I'll write some more in a bit after the first developer forum, "Secondhand Shopping: Efficient Component Reuse".
--DP