MetaFilter posts tagged with logic

bop the alligator

speicus — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:11:11 -0800

DroidQuest, Gate and Logicly are modern logic puzzle games based on the classic educational games Rocky's Boots (1982) and Robot Odyssey (1984). Originally conceived as a sequel to Warren Robinett's Adventure (1979) for the Atari 2600, Rocky's Boots became a revolutionary educational game that combined Adventure's interactive graphical environment with gameplay that taught the player how to build more and more intricate digital logic circuits. And as you might expect from the creator of one of the first Easter Eggs, it also contained a few secrets (like a hidden room with an alligator that would eat your cursor). Robot Odyssey was the fiendishly difficult sequel to Rocky's Boots, in which the player tries to escape from the labyrinthine Robotropolis by programming and reprogramming three robots named Sparky, Checkers and Scanner. (Perhaps in response to Robot Odyssey's difficulty, its successor Gertrude's Secrets (1986) was much simpler and did away with logic gates entirely.) While these games have nearly faded into obscurity, thankfully there are a few nostalgia-driven games in the same style that run on modern machines. DroidQuest is an incredibly faithful remake of Robot Odyssey made in Java, while Gate presents robot rewiring puzzles with a simpler, slicker interface. Finally, if you just want to hook up some logic gates in a sandbox environment, Logicly is a bare-bones but pretty Flash implementation.

Games, Actions and Social Software

jouke — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 09:51:17 -0800

Games, Actions and Social Software. As seen through the lens of mathematics and logic. Presented as a discussion between characters. It's the result of the collaboration of a group of creative researchers from philosophy, logic, computer science, cognitive science and economics, to investigate the logical, computational and strategic aspects of social mechanisms. The literary form is inspired by Galileo Galileis 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Raymond Smullyans Is God a Taoist? and the dialogues in Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach. "More specic issues mentioned in the project description, such as the development and renement of general theories of intelligent interaction, or the analysis of specic social mechanisms for voting, decision making, exchange of goods and services, auctioning, and so on, will be dealt with in the other project book."

If a train leaves Chicago at noon carrying 20 passengers, 5 of whom smoke, in 4 cars, what is the name of the conductor's dog?

desjardins — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:39:19 -0800

A nearly impossible logic puzzle. Other mindtwisting puzzles. More puzzles of varying difficulty (don't scroll down too far!). XKCD's take. (previously epic post Also: 1, 2)

I am a strange loop.

loquacious — Sat, 30 May 2009 21:30:41 -0800

Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid has been recorded as a series of video lectures for MIT's Open Courseware project.

Youtube logician explains why God must exist

stupidsexyFlanders — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 08:31:50 -0800

Apparently there's at least a 51% chance of God's existence. It starts out 50/50, like with pets. You have, say, either a dog or a cat. It's a 50/50 chance that it's one or the other, just like it's 50/50 that there's a God or not. Well, we exist. You exist. The earth exists. That nudges it up to 51%. If I understand this youtube gentleman. Hilarious exercise in smug delivery of ironclad logic.

Revolutionary Semiconductor

daniel_charms — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:35:51 -0800

Friday Flash Fun*: Конструктор: Engineer of the People, in which you are an engineer working in a top-secret semiconductor facility called H3, designing top-secret integrated circuits based on specifications provided to you. *For certain values of 'fun'

A decent list from Cracked? Wow.

flatluigi — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:56:05 -0800

Five ways 'common sense' lies to you - a description of some everyday logical fallacies and how they effect us in a larger scale.

In the Two Rooms with black curtains near the station...

schyler523 — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:13:50 -0800

Metafilter's Back Monday Flash Fun: Two Rooms is a logic game where you trigger switches to move barriers out of your way. The twist? There are two rooms where you switch between "cursors" to activate the switches. There is a good in game tutorial. Have fun.

(Un)blinding them with science!

Mr. Anthropomorphism — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:24:24 -0800

In a breathless, passionate, yet level-headed 15 part series, YouTube user, paleontologist, ex-Christian, and potential Space Coyote impersonator AronRa presents an uncommonly well-written and presented argument against what he identifies as the 14 "Fundamental Falsehoods of Creationism." All your favorites are addressed: 1. "Evolution = Atheism" (transcript) 2. "Scriptures are the 'Word of God'" (transcript) 3. "Human Interpretation = Absolute Truth" (transcript) 4. "Belief = knowledge" (transcript) 5. “Evolution = the religion of atheism” (transcript) 6. “Evolution must explain the origin of life, the universe, and everything.” (transcript) 7. “Evolution is random.”(transcript) 8. “Mutations are rare, harmful decreases in genetic information.” (transcript) 9. “No transitional species have ever been found.” (transcript) 10. “The evolutionary ‘tree of life’ is nowhere implied either in the fossil record, nor in any aspect of biology.” (transcript) 11. “Macroevolution has never been observed.” (transcript) 12. “Creation science” (transcript) 13. “Evolution is a fraud!” (transcript) 14. “Creation is evident” Part I (transcript) 15. “Creation is evident” Part II (transcript)

David Foster Wallace on Fatalism

homunculus — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 09:05:19 -0800

Consider the Philosopher. The early metaphysical investigations of David Foster Wallace.

The Mathemagician and Pied Puzzler, and others

cog_nate — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:21:50 -0800

The Mathemagician and Pied Puzzler (PDF, rough table of contents here) is a collection of puzzles created by members of the Gathering 4 Gardner Foundation, in tribute to the man himself (previously). Also freely available at the G4G site is Puzzle Craft (PDF), by Stewart Coffin. (The Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections, also by Coffin, is available here.)

stop crying kindle fanboy

taz — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 07:16:24 -0800

Some are calling it the "Kindle Killer". (Demo launch video at engadget.) Plastic Logic's new e-reader, expected to be out in the first half of 2009, does promise to offer a lot that Kindle and most other other popular e-readers don't, like a larger display, big enough to provide a newspaper or magazine layout; touch-based markup and annotation; the ability to read standard documents and other file types without conversion; (promised) Wi-Fi connectivity (including the ability to transfer documents between readers); and last but not least, a screen display that you can hit with a shoe, and isn't that something we've all been waiting for during these tense times? But in the Plastic Logic vs Amazon Kindle smackdown, "Plastic Logic says they don't plan to compete with Kindle directly, instead, it's targeting business mobile professionals with 'a lot of documents already,' not those who will get all their content from the Amazon store." Heh. The question on everyone's lips, of course, is what about price? Wired reports that while pricing has not been announced, "officials said the reader would be "priced competitively" with devices such as the Kindle, which currently costs $359". Other questions? The NYT touches on issues of privacy, mentioning that, "as an electronic device, newspapers can determine who is reading their paper, and even which articles are being read. Advertisers would be able to understand their audience and direct advertising to its likeliest customers" and wonders "how much people will pay for a device and the newspaper subscription for it". (emphasis mine)

Domino logic

Upton O'Good — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:46:34 -0800

Neil Fraser builds logic gates out of dominoes. (See also this half-adder.) Via Mathpuzzle.

The Fallacy of Examples

homunculus — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:25:09 -0800

The Fallacy of Examples, and the problems of extrapolating from media. [Via RConversation]

Divine instruments for self learning

generalist — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:59:48 -0800

Mnemonic Arts of Blessed Raymond LULL

Duck-dragons, dancing raccoons, and robots

wanderingmind — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:38:55 -0800

Inspired by this earlier post, I thought it was time to formally introduce people to Rocky's Boots. Created in 1982 by Warren Robinett, Rocky's Boots was intended to teach digital logic to elementary-school kids. It was a sort of spiritual sequel (in that you also play a rectangle who can pick up and drop stuff) to his better-known game, Atari Adventure. Robinett is not only entirely responsible for that game (including the duck-dragons), but was the inventor of the Easter Egg, used there to make sure people knew whose work it was; it was Atari's policy at the time to never name its programmers or let them share in the profits from the sale of the games they'd spent so much hard work on. After leaving Atari, Robinett got funding from the NSF to found The Learning Company, which, in addition to producing Rocky's Boots, also came out with a much more difficult sequel two years later called Robot Odyssey, which has the player burning microchips and rigging up automated robots to solve puzzles. Robot Odyssey itself has been given an enhanced port to Java, although it hasn't been updated in a while.

Blinking lights!

orthogonality — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 02:45:07 -0800

This is a cool game you can download. Here are some rule books for it. Ok, it's not really a "game", but it's lots of fun, especially if like me you're too clumsy to actually solder.

The island where eye color can kill you.

languagehat — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 07:47:32 -0800

A mindbending logic puzzle. A thousand people on the island, 900 brown-eyed and 100 blue-eyed; anyone who learns their own eye color must kill themself the next day; a visitor mentions that there is a blue-eyed person on the island; what happens? Nothing, you say, because they already know that? Wrong. Further details at the Terry Tao post linked above, but don't scroll down below the boxed description unless you want hints and/or spoilers. I'm not normally one for logic puzzles, but this one baffled and fascinated me to the point that I couldn't get my work done, so I thought I'd wreck your lives as well. If you want a complete spoiler, it's explained at the Wikipedia article on common knowledge. I note that some of the commenters at the Terry Tao post are remarkably stupid. (Via Avva; Terry's blog previously on MeFi in this post.)

Parmenides

homunculus — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 13:36:03 -0800

Parmenides. "The pre-Socratic philosopher sparked an intellectual revolution that still echoes today. Yet for philosophy and science to continue to progress in the 21st century, we may need to embark on an entirely new cognitive journey ."

Logic puzzles

Upton O'Good — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:52:34 -0800

A virtually unlimited supply of randomly-generated logic puzzles, in a variety of sizes and difficulties: Nonograms. Slither Link. Nurikabe. Bridges. Light Up.

Let's Do Lunch

Soup — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 17:12:03 -0800

Let’s Do Lunch. (Previously and previously.)

Correct letters in wrong positions

Blazecock Pileon — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 06:13:48 -0800

Use everyone's logic and vocabulary skills to figure out what the secret word is.

free-willy?

saulgoodman — Wed, 23 May 2007 11:30:08 -0800

According to this guy, you’re not ultimately morally responsible for choosing whether to snark or not to snark in response to this FPP. A discussion of the philosophical problems surrounding freewill from British Analytic philosopher Galen Strawson. (Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s throw in this unrelated review of Strawson’s latest work on consciousness, just for an extra splash of color.)

topless

four panels — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 18:33:23 -0800

A graphical dissertation of Mims' "This Is Why I'm Hot". Consider the reasoning, first, of just "I'm hot 'cause I'm fly": Mims is hot because he's fly. But it raises the question: Does being hot guarantee one's being fly? "You ain't 'cause you not" would seem to clear that up: It would appear that fly and hot are interchangable. If you are one, you are both; if you aren't at least one, you are neither.

So you think you're smart?

Vamier — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 14:38:25 -0800

The Einstein Puzzle by Flowix Games is based on an old DOS game called Sherlock, which, in turn, was based on Einstein's (Supposed) Puzzle (Previously). No, it's not Friday yet, and no, it's not Flash. It's a really logical game, and it's really damn hard. I've only won once, and that was within the first few times of playing. If you find it hard to figure out what's going on, read THIS... It helped me to figure out EXACTLY what the hell was going on. The authors are Russian, and the help in the game may only serve to confuse you. ;) It's free, and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I'm hooked on it, Dammit. :D