Bring your puzzles and games! The first meeting is
Wednesday Feb 10th at 11 am in the fabulous and highest room on campus, ECS 642 (not strictly highest).
The theme we are beginning with is mathematical puzzles and games. I have a couple that I will bring, but I encourage others to do so as well. This includes card games like SET, physical puzzles (hopefully we can get some on loan too) brain teasers, games you invented, etc.
Here is one for you to think about before you get there:
We have an airplane with n seats and n passengers. Exactly 1 passenger is blind. The blind passenger chooses a random seat (uniformly) among the ones that are available when he or she boards. The other passengers sit in their own seats unless their seat is occupied, in which case they choose uniformly at random as well. What is the probability that the blind person sits in their assigned seat?
A prize for the first person to send me a solution (or explain it in person)! (to be handed out at the seminar).
Maybe you like paradoxes. Here is a very famous one. Let S be the set of all sets which do not contain themselves. Does S exist? This brings us to self referencing sentences: One must (never) pay attention to things written in parentheses.
That is enough from me for now, but I look forward to what others bring to the table!
Cheers,
Alejandro Erickson
Chair of the MCSPSS (for lack of a better title)
Good work.
ReplyDeleteConstructive criticism: While I LOVE comic sans, it is not very easy to read so I suggest changing the font to something different :)
Thanks for the input, Jenn. I changed it to the Helvetica font which seems a lot easier to read, and still has roughly the same shapes I was going for.
ReplyDeleteThe whole template *should* show up nicely on any type of device and be able to keep its style even when people need to change the size of the text, but I only have my laptop, so I appreciate other's testing this.