Bounded-Error Log

Yeah, and there’s this. chaotic_iak rejected this variant for his February sequence in order to get consistent 7x7 dimensions, so I made one. It’s been about a month. I have no idea why I procrastinated posting it until now.

This is a Samurai Fillomino, which means each grid satisfies the constraints on its own. Write a number in every empty cell so that, in each square grid, every group of cells with the same number that is connected through its edges has that number of cells. Note that the two grids must contain the same numbers where they overlap, but the grouping should be considered independently. I’d explain this really carefully if it weren’t the main gimmick of this puzzle.

Google just announced it’s shutting down Google Reader in three and a half months… I am participating in the friendly Reddit DDoS-hug of all the alternatives (list, but scroll around in the thread for a few more). Darn.

Yay crazy hybrids! I guess this one is kind of hard.

Draw a loop through adjacent vertices that cannot intersect itself. For each pair of symmetrically placed numbers, one is a Slitherlink clue which indicates how many of the four edges around it are drawn, and one is a Contact clue which indicates the total length of all straight segments adjacent to it where segment length is always measured up to the nearest turns in the loop.

(This was a WordPress bug that should no longer be relevant.)

So, what have I been doing with programming recently?

Scala is an amazing multiparadigm programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine and interoperates with Java. I learned about it last time reading random articles on Twitter.

When I say “amazing” I mean “This is a language in which my code gives me nerdgasms every time I read it.” Wheeee.

Okay, it’s not perfect. People say it’s too academic. It has a notoriously complicated type system (which is Turing-Complete at compile time). Its documentation is a bit patchy too. For a serious introduction, the Scala website has plenty of links under documentation, and a tour of features. Somebody wrote another tour that explains things a bit more. So here, instead of introducing it seriously, I’m just going to screw with its features.

Example of freedom. Scala lets names consist of symbols, and treats one-parameter methods and infix operators exactly the same. The full tokenization rules are a bit detailed and I put them at the bottom of this post for the interested. This lets you create classes with arithmetic and domain-specific languages easily, but it also creates some silly opportunities:

scala> val * = 12
*: Int = 12

scala> * * * * *
res0: Int = 1728

A Naoki Inaba (JP) type, as seen on Para’s Puzzle Site.

Draw a loop through adjacent vertices that cannot intersect itself; each number indicates the total length of all straight segments adjacent to it, where segment length is always measured up to the nearest turns in the loop.

Let’s see how well WordPress’s scheduling works again. Happy Chinese New Year!

Disclaimer: just because a significant number of people in group A (esp. of a certain race/ethnicity) also have quality B does not mean that (i) all or most people of group A have quality B or (ii) people of group A who do not have quality B are in any way strange or inferior.

In other words, stereotypes are stupid; don’t apply them to real people.

The stereotypical “Asian” (a person from “Asia”, a mythical faraway continent consisting of two countries, China and Japan) is too hard-working, gets disowned for any grade below an A, has infinitesimally thin eyeslits, and pronounces L’s and R’s identically.

The internet says the L/R thing is mostly due to Japanese having only a single sound somewhere in between those two. Wikipedia has a page on Japanese phonology which seems to support this. Still, Wikipedia articles on phonology all consist of giving every sound a long incomprehensible name, such as the “apical postalveolar flap undefined for laterality” for the Japanese sound discussed above, and I’m not Japanese, so don’t take my word for it.

Mandarin Chinese (blatantly ignoring the myriad dialect variations) has a perfect L sound (ㄌ) and an R sound (ㄖ) that is only a little different. Of course, there are people who still pronounce them identically, but it’s not common — generally, the language teaches L’s and R’s well. Right?

Nikoli Slitherlink + Masyu hybrid; I don’t know who first put them together but combinations like this aren’t rare.

Draw a loop through vertices that cannot intersect itself; each number indicates how many of the four edges around it are drawn; the loop must pass through all large dots, and it must go straight through white dots while turning either before or after (or both), while it must turn on black dots without turning either before or after.

mathgrant’s hybrid type: a Fillomino (write a number in every empty cell so that every group of cells with the same number that is connected through its edges has that number of cells) where each tetromino has had their 4s replaced by one of L, I, T, or S describing their shape, and they obey the rules of LITS — they can touch if they are not congruent, they must all be connected, and their squares cannot form a 2x2 block.