I read a much better solution to the hundred-prisoners problem.
Let the prisoners designate one of their number as the leader.
Now the leader, when taken to the central room, will switch off the
light, if it is on, and count the number of times he has switched it
off. (If that number equals 99, he will assert that everyone has
been in the room.)
Any person who is not the leader will, when taken to the room, switch
on the light, if it is off and he has not previously switched it
on. Once he has switched it on once, he takes no further action.
(If he finds the light already on, he will also take no action.)
The insight I missed is that you can accumulate the relevant
information by counting light bulb transitions rather than by
counting elapsed days.
It will still probably take the prisoners many years to be
released.
I had (once again) my best-ever game. In this game I was at level
14, with rustproof Mjollnir and Fire Brand, and, because I did the
protection thing right, I had AC -22. (I also got a wish from a
lamp in the mines, and had a +2 gray dragon scale mail, which was
very useful.) In addition to this, I completed Sokoban and had a
bag of holding, full of all kinds of things; I had rings of
regeneration and increase damage, and I had all of the
straightforward-to-acquire intrinsics (and magic resistance from the
gray dragon scale mail). I was all set for the Quest (and had found
the portal), but I didn't want to do it because I had managed to get a
pet rock troll who had AC around -2 and was wielding Fire Brand.
(That rock troll was really something; he could kill aligned priests,
shopkeepers, guards, etc., in at most two turns, with hardly
a scratch.)
I had also identified most potions and scrolls, and also a large
collection of rings (the entire inventory of a jewelry shop, I think,
plus several which happened to by lying around). I did lose some
of that knowledge to a mind flayer, but I still knew the ones which
were important to me (including identify, which I still had two
copies of).
I decided to go all the way through the Mines (I'd previously
stopped at the Mine Town) with my pet in order to collect spare
tools and possibly magical items, in preparation for blessing a
scroll of identify and regaining the knowledge lost to shopkeepers.
On my way back out, I killed a cockatrice. It left a corpse, and
I thought of wielding it -- since I had gloves -- but I found that
Mjollnir along with my giant-corpse-enhanced strength and my
ring of increase damage was working pretty well. I had yet to
encounter any monsters which I couldn't kill promptly. The corpse
seemed like overkill (and would keep me from getting food from
monsters I killed.) So I left the corpse and continued searching the
level.
Then:
The soldier swings his cockatrice corpse. The soldier hits!--More--
You are slowing down. Your limbs are stiffening.
Wow -- a soldier had a pair of gloves and the foresight to discover
the corpse and wield it as a weapon against me. OK, I thought,
this is no problem -- this is the reason I have two lizard corpses
right here in my inventory and not in my bag of holding.
I ate the corpse. "You feel limber."
That's a relief, I thought. But the soldier immediately hit me
with the corpse again.
The soldier swings his cockatrice corpse. The soldier hits!--More--
You are slowing down. Your limbs are stiffening.
OK, that's why I have two lizard corpses. But I have to
kill this soldier somehow before he can hit me with the corpse a third
time...
You hit the soldier. Lightning strikes the soldier!--More--
Your limbs have turn to stone. You have turned to stone.--More--
You are a statue.--More--
Do you want your possessions identified? [ynq] (n)
That's what I get for walking around at Strained. It really does make
a difference. I had only a single turn after being hit with the
cockatrice corpse. If I didn't use that turn to eat a lizard corpse,
but instead used it to fight, I would be petrified. And that's what
happened.
Now, if I'd realized that, what I could have done was pray the first
time (to prevent stoning and simultaneously stop the soldier's
attack), and then use my turn to teleport myself or the soldier.
Then I could have blinded myself to watch the soldier's movements
and fought him from a distance with wands. (Or I could just have
dropped some stuff to make myself unburdened.) But it's
characteristic of NetHack that you always think of how you could
have saved yourself after you get killed. (Sometimes
you think of how you could save yourself before you get killed,
but then you don't get killed.)
I went to the Fillmore to hear Femi
Kuti, at Biella's suggestion. And on Sunday I went to the
Berkeley
physics auction in Oakland. The auction was a nice time -- it
was the follow-on auction to an earlier preview auction (which I
also attended). One side effect of my trip to the auction was that
I learned where the Bibliomania book store is (relative to other
things I know). Another was that I learned where the Macarthur BART
station is (also relative to other things I know).
The things offered for sale there were very beautiful. It was again
surprising what people were willing to pay for certain things. (Now
I'm thinking of how I quoted the Lorax to TechTV on Friday when they
interviewed me about the broadcast flag. But I'm not surprised that
people bought any of the items: I'm just surprised at the prices.)
Single-beam balances routinely sold for over $500 apiece (sometimes
for $700 or $800). Most of the nicest voltmeters and ammeters went
for over $150. A particularly elegant microscope sold for over $3,000.
I purchased lot 1148, "Two Hartmann & Braun Amp meters and a
resistance box". These are
marked "1936"; the resistance box is
also marked "Western Electric". All of them are wood-cased; the
ammeters are AC meters (unfortunately), of oak, bakelite, iron, glass,
and leather. (I didn't like the leather, but I guess I'm willing to
buy used artifacts even when they are made of leather. Books are
another example of this.)
At the auction, I ran into
Paulina
Borsook, whom I'd previously met at a conference, as well as a
friend of hers whose name I've forgotten. I got to talk to them
briefly; they really admired the craftsmanship with which these
instruments had been produced. That was an abiding theme of this
auction; people kept saying things like "They don't make 'em like
they used to" or "They don't make 'em like that any more".
The resistance box makes a satisfying "Click!" when you turn the
dial to adjust the resistance. Maybe I can use it as a volume
control.
We had an LNX-BBC meeting at my
place in the afternoon and evening. (It ran about ten hours.) We made
a lot of good progress and now have an automatically-compiled BBC image
which can boot from CD to a login prompt. When you log in, you get a
shell and hundreds of working programs.
To my astonishment, I was also able to run X, and even start up
twm, some xterms, some copies of xeyes, and even an Xnest (within
which I started a different twm, and some other xterms). None of
this should be taken to mean that the BBC is done, but it's
tantalizingly close, because it's now actually bootable.
(It's not yet a business card; the current image is over 100 MB,
so it will not fit on a 50 MB business card. We need to write
several rules
which delete useless files from the tree before creating
the CD.)
Stephen McCamant wrote to me about Sokoban, with an interesting
reply to my question about whether there is a compact notation for
Sokoban problems, or an automated method for solving them. The
answer is basically "no", but it's very interesting. :-)
I have a number of CDs which have become damaged over time, and it's
well known that publishers won't replace your damaged CDs.
(I've never tried it, though -- maybe I should write to some of them
and ask them to do so.) Right now I'm listening to Verdi's
Requiem, and it's skipping, which is incredibly
distracting.
17 USC
202 says that owning the physical medium does not mean that I'm
allowed to duplicate it, which is bad news if the physical medium
is prone to failure. (I know that making backups is typically
considered a fair use.) Do publishers consider it a feature that
individual copies degrade and fail?
It seems to me that making backups is a really important thing when
dealing with media which will degrade or be damaged. There's a
funny phenomenon where people who sell mod chips for Playstations
and so on will market them for "playing backups". It seems that
a lot of these dealers, or their customers, are actually saying
"playing wink wink nudge nudge backups". (It might be
better if they talked about playing import games. Talk about
barriers to trade!)
But I wonder why all the winking and nudging; actual backups of
(say) Playstation games seem very prudent.
