ℤ→ℤ

The Balance is a cooperative card game published by New Venture Games.

We develop a formula for counting the number of bags of length \(l\) containing \(d\) distinct elements drawn from \(t\) objects.

This year is the 60th anniversary of Joseph Weizenbaum’s article “ELIZA—A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine”.

Within the history of cryptography, the tale of how Bletchley Park broke Germany’s Enigma cipher has been told many times, in both print and on screen.

TimesSquare is a programming puzzle created by Dennis Shasha and published in the April 2026 issue of Communications of the ACM.

Over the past year, I’ve been acting as the treasurer for a small publishing company.

While the study of textbooks has proven fruitful in the study of the history of mathematics, there has been little attention to computing books and their role on the development of computer science, the computer industry, and public understanding.

Leonardo of Pisa (c1170-1241+), better known as Fibonacci, wrote Liber Abaci to introduce and advocate the adoption of “Indian figures” (Hindu-Arabic numerals) to Italy.

George Boole (1815-1864) was a mathematician best known as the progenitor of the Boolean algebra, the system of logic that acts as a fundamental layer within digital systems.

In 1971, three college roommates developed an educational computer game.

In Fifth Edition (5e) Dungeons & Dragons™ (D&D), druids can transform into certain Beast forms using the Wild Shape ability.

On August 15th, 1971, President Nixon declared a 90-day freeze on wages, rents, and prices.

John Bridges is a software engineer that co-developed PCPaint, which in 1984 was one of the earliest digital painting programs and helped spur the use of mice within the IBM PC market.

The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers: From Fast Machines to Fast Codes is a technical and business history of the roughly three-decades when Seymour Cray dominated the development of a class of computer called the “supercomputer”.

As catalogs for digital marketplaces grow in size, customers have greater difficulty in finding products that meet their needs.

Connect 4 is a solved game in the m,n,k family.

Early post-war computing can often seem alien as terminology mixed metaphors and the pioneers brought their own distinct toolsets to the field.

Ludii is a general game system for modeling games and puzzles, although it focuses on historical and traditional games.

MacPaint is a monochromatic raster image painting program that introduced many people to mouse-driven controls, tool palettes, and copy and paste integration with other applications.

Charles Dodgson (pen name Lewis Carroll) had difficulty remembering numbers, such as dates.

The new generation of code assistance tools powered by Large Language Models (LLM)s may be useful in efficiently categorizing and translating historical software corpora.

Chatbots Decoded: Exploring AI is a new exhibit from the Computer History Museum (CHM) opening November 20th, 2024.

From the Board Games Study Journal: Mathematical analysis of the Royal Game of Ur Despite many discoveries and proposals for rules for the ancient board game known as the Royal Game of Ur (RGU), no mathematical analysis has yet been performed investigating

I’ve given this blog a new look by switching the theme from Noteworthy to Long Form, the latter a theme of my own design.

The mapping of integers to integers is a fair summary of the work of programming.

Many corporations and agencies allocate a certain amount of their budget towards the creation of public artwork.

In December 2022, Adobe, through the Computer History Museum (CHM), released the source code for PostScript®, version 1.0.

ZLister, a to-do list management application, is now available.

I’ve started studying a larger historical code base.

Twelve states require community associations, such as homeowners associations or HOAs, to conduct periodic reserve studies.

Before the widespread existence of software repositories like CPAN, NPM, and PyPI, developers seeking to reuse an existing algorithm or library of routines would either check books or journals for code, or, they just might post a classified ad: Request po…

In my post on the Method of Differences, I focused on using the technique to generate mathematical tables.

The “Method of Differences” is a mathematical technique for reducing the computation of polynomials to repeated addition.

Although historians are usually pushed to decide questions of “who was first,” the question of impact is more interesting.

For those interested in the history of tabletop roleplaying game design, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in Ground is an excellent, near encyclopedic treatment.

Shared Fantasy is an ethnographic study of fantasy roleplayers in the Minnesota area from 1977 to 1979 by Gary Alan Fine.

Godot 4’s HTML5 export uses WebAssembly, WebGL, and SharedArrayBuffers.

Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World is an academic history of the perspective and practice of magic.

Before dice notation was adopted, early roleplaying games described dice rolls using range notation.

Robinson after being elected to the Moscow Soviet, book page 103 Robert Robinson was a black machinist who accepted an offer from the Soviets to leave his job at the Ford plant to come to Russia to help train their machinists in the 1930s.

The SHARE organization was organized in 1955 to share operational knowledge and computer programs for operators of the IBM 704.

In the Call of Cthulhu adventure “Chateau of Blood”, the characters are faced between spending the day trapped in an ominous chateau where they will likely be attacked by monsters or attempting to navigate a treacherous mountain trail as a ferocious blizz…

Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons by Ben Riggs Author’s website Slaying the Dragon is a business history of TSR, focusing on the Lorraine Williams period (1985-1997).

Slack’s business logic for showing notification periodically appears in LinkedIn posts and such.

Being on-call is often a necessary part of the job, particularly for engineers in a SaaS business.

COBOL is for Big Data.

“The best way to grasp the spirit of a programming language is to read example programs” as Knuth wrote in the “The Early Development of Programming Languages” 1.

Rosetta Code is a programming chrestomathy wiki, that is, it is a site with lots of examples of tasks completed in multiple programming languages.

In 1986, a survey of approximate string matching algorithms found the algorithm used in the PLATO computer-aided instruction system was third place in quality (F1 score) and was an order of magnitude faster than the best performing algorithms.

Approximate string matching algorithms (ASMA) determine if two strings are the same, “close enough”, or are distinct.