JoeAltmaier

To be clear, the digit at position i is the row number of the queen in column i. So 12345678 is every queen along the diagonal (clearly not a solution).

The model (8 different digits representing row in that column) no queen was in the same row or column, by construction. So only the diagonal test remains.

Terry Pratchet's entire corpus

Back in the day BYTE magazine had a puzzle contest - solve the 8-queens problem and find all the solutions.

As a kid, it seemed obvious to me that a good model was the digits 1 through 8, representing the row that a queen would be in. Doing a recursive backtracker on an ordering of the digits and testing each pair for diagonal (digit i minus digit j was equal to +/- i-j) and my BASIC program spit out the solutions in twenty minutes.

I didnt enter the contest because I figured everybody would do that. Turns out when the editor published the 'best' solutions, they all, every single one, modeled the board as an 8 by 8 array and ran around following diagonals iteratively. And took hours to complete.

Anyway, choosing a good solution model is most of the problem solved.

We made huckleberry jam - strained out the seeds, threw them in the compost heap in the back yard. Next spring: a wild profusion of huckleberry plants. So sometimes it's not hard to grow them.

Wow. American life expectancy is 38th worldwide.

Note the Treaty of Ebla and Abarsal, from about 2350 BCE, exists in scores of clauses on a tablet.

My reimagining: An appliance that drools sugar syrup, or carbohydrate, or fat, or protein into a cup. Electric, using micro-machines etched into silicon wafers that sew the molecules together out of elements in the air (CHON)

Surface area is a materials problem? Folded microstructure, atomic-scale textured surface or some other science-fiction solution could have square kilometers of surface area in a shoebox.

Yes! Pretty much everything the driver touches is no longer directly controlling anything. THe brakes are anti-lock (electronic control can disconnect them). The steering depends on assist motors. The throttle is just a suggestion.

Even my rear-view mirror is a camera, and currently it has failed (shows matrix style drippy blue lines instead of a picture.

All true, to a degree. The particular degree affects where money is invested, borrowed, deposited. It may not 'kill' private ownership, but it will change it, perhaps drastically as other options become more attractive.

Economics is as dot-to-dot picture that folks love to draw sketchy conclusions from by connecting just the dots they see or want to see. But you have to connect all the dots to get a real picture

A 5% reduction in fuel is significant, especially as cargo ships are responsible for a disproportionate share of petro-pollution. They burn the cheapest petro gunk, emitting tremendous volumes of soot and such.

Oh some few. No right triangle with rational sides has area equal to a perfect square depends on N=4 for instance. And it can be used to form other theorems that are terribly actionable. Every elliptical curve over Q is modular, which has consequences throughout number theory.

But yes, none of those are very tangible, until applied to problem solutions that are tangible.

We mock ancient medicine. But they were modelling health in ways that made sense to them, and which gave them some sense of control. Humors, Chakras, even Freud's Ego, Id and SuperEgo were simple models that could be taught and gave some rational for treatment.

Today's models will be seen as childishly simple and unfortunate, in time.

I meant, each supposed 'fix' is flawed in ways that have been thought about and written about for decades.

Folks here post their first hasty thought and may think it's new and original and worth a dialog. They are not.

Science Fiction has covered the AI panic in perhaps hundreds of stories. Yet we blindly recapitulate the plots as if we don't know how this will turn out.

You know, where most of the universities are.

And, who said anything about Japan? Confused.

<pedant>28% of adult Americans</pedant>

Makes sense - surface reflections are a thing they normally have to navigate?

Human-readable? Why? Just sprinkle RFID tags in the roadway, and drive it and register the tags and GPS/Inertial frame with a database and now you know where you are with machine-readable 'signs'.

And what fraction of the traffic?

Pedantically true. By population density, NYC is essentially the whole state, or what matters anyway, to the huge majority of residents.

We'll have arrived at the automated transit network when they stop putting up road signs. The cars know where they are, and how to get there. Signs are for fallible ignorant humans.

Grotesqueries that would give me nightmares. With the exception of the communi-grater which is just cool.

Just numbers? Was there a link to the sources in there?

Not that uncommon. It's so easy to just put up the new thing and make the old thing the failure route. But the old thing nearly never had the bandwidth for today's traffic. A famous EBay outage some years ago was just such a scenario.

Cool! The pictures remind me of my business partner Tom's basement - full of every computer and device he ever owned since the 1970's. But his are more orderly, sorted and filed and often in the original packaging. It'll be a great contribution to some museum one day.

Really? The man directly responsible for defeating all measures meant to protect the public? Sounds serious to me.

Thanks - I was using the wrong table, total coconut or something.

All water under the bridge. Ethanol is now a paying proposition. And it uses corn we used to dump.

Very cool! The raw-metal boot part is impressive.

BASIC requires more support than you'd expect. Here's an interpreter, with a similarly long list of features it has to support:

https://www.moondew.com/basic/index.htm