Monday, February 16, 2015

Empirically testing the "three hats game"

After reading the brain teaser here, I couldn't convince myself that the solution was correct:
http://www.futilitycloset.com/2015/02/17/the-three-hats-game/
It still seems impossible to me that any player should be able to do better than 50% at guessing the color of his own hat. So I wrote a C program to try out the strategy across 10000 games and report what it found. And indeed it does seem to work. I'd paste the code, but blogger sucks at code formatting. So here it is instead:
https://gist.github.com/anonymous/b3e0a653097e61bec498

Friday, February 06, 2015

Ubuntu: use syndaemon disable touchpad while typing

As this page describes, syndaemon solves the problem of trying to type on a laptop and having the cursor jump somewhere else because it thinks you touched the touchpad:

http://www.webupd8.org/2009/11/ubuntu-automatically-disable-touchpad.html