Boy drops DS in gorilla cage, inadvertently creates the best photo op ever
After reportedly being unable to figure out the confusing friend code system, the gorilla knocked it around and eventually lost interest.
The boy got his system back when a trainer lured the gorilla with an apple and was able to snatch the device out of the gorilla’s hands. It then grabbed a princess and jumped up a tower of ladders and construction beams before throwing down barrels of oil.
Every position of Rubik’s Cube™ can be solved in twenty moves or less.
Except by you (or me), of course.
Stay with it. Once you get past the first layer and get multiple scattering, it’s a reasonable visual analog to supercriticality.
Choose the strength of explosives, set their timers and sit back and watch the pieces fly!
Take the numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 and make them equal 100 by placing any mathematical symbols you like between them.
I don’t play, so I don’t know if the first rule about Farmville is Don’t Talk About Farmville!
As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less. Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks. In other words, the more you play Farmville the less you have to play Farmville. For such a popular game, this seems suspicious.
There is now a flash version of xkcd’s Hell cartoon. So you can now play the game.
Miss Low. It’s worth it.
No, that’s not a euphemism. Browser Pong.
Rands in Repose: Gaming the System
There’s a discoverable structure to the rules. There’s a correct order, which, when followed, offers a type of reward. It’s the advantage of thinking three blocks ahead in Tetris or holding onto those beguiling hypercubes in Bejeweled. This is the advanced discovery of the system around the rules that leads to exponential geek joy.
There’s a paradox and a warning inside of optimization and repetition.
The paradox involves the implications of winning. Geeks will furiously work to uncover the rules of a game and then use those rules to determine how they might win. But the actual discovery of how to win is a buzz kill. The thrill, the adrenalin, comes from the discovery, hunt, and eventual mastery of the unknown, which, confusingly, means if you want to keep a geek engaged in a game you can’t let them win, even though that’s exactly what they think they want.
The theme-within-a-theme in the story is that science is a lot like this. Just like a gamer, scientists are looking to find the rules of nature. In fact, in complex games where you don’t know most of the rules at the outset and have to figure them out as you go, you will find aspects of the scientific method. Systematic testing where you change the conditions and see what the outcome is.
I don’t know what kills that monster, so I’ll try different characters or weapons to find the vulnerability.
Oh look, pac-man ate that dot and all the ghosts turned blue. I wonder what that means?