DNM in NYT

Announcement! On Monday, October 8, the Numberplay blog in the New York Times will feature a problem based on my book, The Universe in Zero Words, and it will also have excerpts from my book. (In fact, it may have a whole chapter; I’m not really sure.)...

Google Trends

Of course everybody on the Internet uses Google for search. But I like some of the parts of the Google site that you might not visit as often. I did a blog post earlier about the Ngram viewer, which shows you the frequency of various words and word combinations over...

Dixit Magister (part 3)

This is the third part of a three-part series. To make things more convenient, here are links to the first part and the second part. As one commenter observed after Part 1, the story is about the man-versus-machine battle. True, that’s a big part of the story,...

Dixit Magister (part 2)

This post is part two of a three-part series. As explained in my previous post, it is an article that I wrote in 2007 but never published, in which I tell the story of the best game I ever played. More than that, it is an attempt to take non-chess players inside the...