I’m visiting my parents, and ironically, this is the first week of actually watching college football. They aren’t much into football.
Right now, it’s almost halftime in the USC-Nebraska game. It looks like the Trojans simply have more athletic players.
Notre Dame is awful. They haven’t scored on offensive touchdown in 3 games.
It’s amazing how the ABC commentators were talking about how well the Penn State defense did. They allowed 24 points against perennial loser Buffalo. Buffalo’s scoring came after the game was decided.
Baylor…at least they’re winning. They tacked on another touchdown to lead Texas St. 28-17 early in the 4th. It’s not very confidence inspiring.
Despite my “Go Horns!” promise, I must say that Texas cannot possibly be a top 10 team. They barely beat Arkansas St. and now Central Florida. Unfortunately, voters aren’t smart enough to take this into account, and will keep the Longhorns in the top 10 simply because they won. The Horns and Aggies are closer in skill than the rankings would indicate (if it’s any comfort, I don’t believe Baylor is a top 10 program either.)
Friggin’ Gators! They crushed Tennessee 59-20 on the road. Last year, I watched a LOT of Gators football, and thought that Tim Tebow would be an inadequate passer. He didn’t pass a lot, going 14/19, but it was for almost 300 yards.
FAU Owls went into Minnesota and beat them 42-39.
Miami-FIU had their rematch after last year’s brawl, the Hurricanes only winning 23-9. I wonder how FIU running back Ned did. Must tell you his amazing story in another post (although it’s quite old news…)
September 15th, 2007
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Posted by Donnie
Filed under Sports
Probably a fair portion of you have heard the name John Conway in conjunction with a game called Life. It’s amazing how the few simple rules can generate tons of interest, research, and analysis.
Playing Life:
This isn’t a game where you take turns to try to obtain an objective; think of it more as a simulator. You start with a grid of cells, a universe (really small for this example). Fill in the cells however you wish. Empty cells are dead, while the grey cells are alive:
A game of Life, turn 0
Each cell has eight neighbor cells surrounding it. The following rules determine whether a cell will be alive on the following turn:
- A dead cell with 3 living neighbors gains life.
- A live cell has 2 or 3 living neighbors stays alive.
- A live cell with 0 or 1 living neighbors dies of loneliness.
- A live cell with 4 or more living neighbors dies of overcrowding.
So taking our starting position above:
What will happen for turn 1?
The green cells are dead cells that will live next turn, and the red cells will be killed.
The next few turns you can see here:
It’s still far from certain what the fate of this universe will be. Sometimes, all the cells will eventually die. Othertimes, the universe will remain stable, or continually expand. There’s no good way to predict how it will end up for an arbitrary starting position.
Another complexity is how we treat the edges of the universe. You could have the universe “wrap around”, so the cells on the far left and far right edges (as well as top and bottom) would actually be neighbors.
I could hack up a basic implementation of Life pretty quickly, but it’s been done so many times, I’ll just link you Johan Bontes’ program. According to the website it’s an awesome program (plus it’s free).
Or, if you have time and graph paper, I suppose you could do it by hand.
September 15th, 2007
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Posted by Donnie
Filed under Mathematics
