Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Mindsport follow-up
Here is my promised follow-up post. One of the two end-games (A computer and a user pick up virtual sticks) appears to have already been solved in the previous Mindsport. The game has a perfect strategy for the second player, and the solution in the column looks good.
Games with perfect strategy or even a reasonably computable straegy have little appeal, of course. It is interesting how many more games are going the way of tic-tac-toe and checkers. (Chinook became the World Checkers champion way back in 1994. They have a tentative proof on their site that their opening cannot be beaten - the proof is in the form of a Java applet.)
The Mindsport for this week isn't online - they seem to publish it online fairly irregularly. Here is the other endgame and the solution.
ENDGAME
One hundred consecutive three digit numbers are each raised to the hundredth power and added. What are the last two digits of the total? (Submitted by Dr V R Muralidharan, docmurali@yahoo.com)
Games with perfect strategy or even a reasonably computable straegy have little appeal, of course. It is interesting how many more games are going the way of tic-tac-toe and checkers. (Chinook became the World Checkers champion way back in 1994. They have a tentative proof on their site that their opening cannot be beaten - the proof is in the form of a Java applet.)
The Mindsport for this week isn't online - they seem to publish it online fairly irregularly. Here is the other endgame and the solution.
ENDGAME
One hundred consecutive three digit numbers are each raised to the hundredth power and added. What are the last two digits of the total? (Submitted by Dr V R Muralidharan, docmurali@yahoo.com)
