SAVE THE PLANET | Jorge's Ponderings

February 18, 2014

For my Christmas gift to young people next year (2020), I plan to put together a Play Nim game package. The Box will be one that I produce with my new laser cutting skills. The instructions and explanation will be the following:

PlayNIM

Since High School days I’ve had a fascination with the game of NIM. I’ve tried on several occasions to write a program to play the ‘perfect game’, but for one reason or another didn’t make it.

Recently I was having fun with a Arduino MEGA 2560 microcontroller. I started with a UNO board but quickly found that it didn’t have enough inputs for my needs. The MEGA has 54 digital inputs and 16 analogs, that should hold me for awhile.

Now I’ve done it! Here is a picture of the hardware side of the solution:

The software side is harder to show, but it works! Sorry, but this is all I have to show:

NimCode1

NimCode2

NimCode3

NimCode4

NimCode5

NimCode6

NimCode7

QuasiCrystals

October 8, 2011

QuasiCrystals are crystal structures that are non-repeating. They were thought to be a mathematical curiosity that did not appear in nature. But in 1982 Daniel Shechtman detected them in electron microscope images of a rapidly cooled metal alloy. He received much resistance including when Linus Pauling, a colossus of science and a double Nobel laureate, mounted a frightening “crusade” against him. After telling Shechtman to go back and read a crystallography textbook, the head of his research group asked him to leave for “bringing disgrace” on the team. “I felt rejected,” Shachtman said. As it turned out he was right and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in October 2011.

Earlier in the 1970’s Sir Roger Penrose was playing around with Penrose Tiles. This is Roger Penrose standing on a floor tiled with one of his patterns: