Stay tuned, presumably, for "squid on a grid"

July 24, 2017 12:12 PM

Let's play a mathematical game I call Swine in a Line. [YouTube, about 3 minutes]. The video is broken into short parts so you have time to think; here are Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. If you prefer text (and spoilers), here is the blog post with detailed explanation.
posted by Wolfdog (9 comments total)

Nice post, Wolfdog! I enjoyed thinking about the game.

However, a warning to my fellow text-preferrers: the blog post is a commentary on the videos, not a substitute. I was pretty frustrated until I figured this out, because the post is full of seeming digressions about pedagogy, and while it does contain some hints that are spoilers if you know what to do with them, it never comes out and tells you exactly what the strategy is.

Anyway, if y'all like this, here's another fun blog post about a puzzle you can try yourself: Given a particular set of digits (e.g. 8, 4, 2, 7, 5), how can you use them to make two integers with the greatest possible product?
posted by aws17576 at 1:31 PM on July 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

I posted Fawn Nguyen's puzzle previously
posted by Wolfdog at 1:59 PM on July 24, 2017

Oh geez, I bet that's even where I first saw it
posted by aws17576 at 2:00 PM on July 24, 2017

"squid on a grid"

Sand in a pile, surely
posted by eruonna at 3:28 PM on July 24, 2017

Foxes in boxes.
posted by madcaptenor at 8:45 PM on July 24, 2017

Oh wow, I'm loving the exploding dots thing mentioned in the blog post. It's pretty neat for multiplication and division, but when it gets to multiplying and dividing polynomials my head asplodes! With delight though.
posted by wilberforce at 9:04 PM on July 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is great. I shared it with my students and they were all engrossed. Great stuff!
posted by Literaryhero at 3:13 AM on July 25, 2017

This is a side note, but I could not help but notice that the swine were both yellow and had the number 17 on their ears. This makes me assume that the creator is an alumnus of the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics, with the founder's emphasis on all things 17 and the yellow pig as the mascot of the program.

(I went there, it was great, if you have mathematically precocious high school students, they should check it out.)
posted by Hactar at 6:45 AM on July 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

Yes, he also writes about HCSSM.
posted by Wolfdog at 7:31 AM on July 25, 2017 [1 favorite]