puzzle solving

Josh Bloch and Jeremy Manson present the eighth installment of Java Puzzlers at Google I/O 2011, a set of surprising corner cases in the Java language and libraries. It includes puzzlers on traps such as regular expression performance.

Veritasium visits the Micromouse competition, where small autonomous robots race to solve mazes at extreme speed. It covers the competition's technical history, including fans and ground effect enabling very high-g turns.

Numberphile talks with Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown about a darts puzzle with a shrinking bullseye. Solving it takes the volumes of high-dimensional spheres, and the answer turns up Euler's number.

Dr. Jason Fung, a nephrologist, explains therapeutic fasting as a treatment for obesity and type 2 diabetes. He frames it around the two-compartment problem of fat storage and insulin resistance.

Matt Might's Curry On talk on ending errors in code, both software and the human genome. He covers conservative approximation of the halting problem via static analysis and a computational approach to precision medicine.

Markus Triska tours Prolog's most distinctive features, including its use as a database and query language, rule processing, constraint solving and compile-time rewriting. It also covers concise meta-interpreters.

Rick Hudson's GopherCon 2015 talk on Go 1.5's new low-latency concurrent garbage collector. It covers the motivation, performance numbers, technical challenges and why the approach fits Go.

3Blue1Brown uses Wordle as an excuse to teach information theory and entropy, building a solver that picks guesses by expected information and incorporating word frequencies.

Joseph Anderson's long critique of Jonathan Blow's puzzle game The Witness, covering its gameplay, its hundreds of puzzles and its philosophical pretensions. He argues it is a great game that he nonetheless advises against playing.

Rich Hickey's philosophical talk from the first Clojure Conj in 2010. He argues that good design comes from deliberate, away-from-keyboard thinking, and describes how to feed the background mind so it solves problems.

Emery Berger explains why performance is hard to measure and deliver on modern hardware, showing how code layout and alignment can swamp optimization effects. He presents Stabilizer for statistically sound evaluation and Coz, a causal profiler.

Pete Hunt of Facebook and Instagram introduces React at JSConf EU 2013 and explains its design principles. He argues that separating templates from logic only separates technologies, not concerns, and makes the case for components.

Tom7 explains how he built a SIGBOVIK 2017 paper made only of printable ASCII bytes that is also a valid DOS executable. He writes a C compiler targeting printable x86 without self-modifying code and solves the puzzles the constraint creates.

3Blue1Brown visualizes high-dimensional spheres to explain a surprising puzzle about how a sphere fits in a box as dimensions grow. It builds geometric intuition for counterintuitive properties of high-dimensional space.

Michael Hendricks of PriceCharting shares tricks and pain points from running Prolog in production for 18 months at Strange Loop. It argues Prolog is a productive modern language beyond logic puzzles, and includes a demo of changing code mid-execution.

3Blue1Brown's discovery-oriented introduction to error correction codes, building up Hamming codes from the puzzle of locating a flipped bit. It explains the parity-check idea and why it is so efficient.

Two Google engineers perform a mock coding interview and then discuss best practices for candidates, including asking clarifying questions and communicating while solving.

Bobby Powers presents Mesh, a drop-in malloc replacement that eliminates memory fragmentation in unmodified C/C++ programs by compacting memory. The talk covers how it works despite C's fixed object addresses, and its benefits for programs like Redis.

Gary Bernhardt's Cascadia Ruby Conference 2011 talk on using the Unix shell for practical problem solving. He builds pipelines interactively by iterative refinement, using small tools as levers.

Isaac Arthur examines the Dyson Dilemma, the puzzle of why we see no Dyson spheres or megastructures if growth-oriented civilizations should build them. He covers detectability and whether such structures could hide.

A design essay on why products designed in Western contexts often fail when deployed in developing countries. It covers expert blindness and cultural assumptions, with examples such as malaria nets and the One Laptop Per Child project.

Stuart Ashen presents a talk at the 2017 Norwich Gaming Festival on Hareraiser, a notoriously bad video game tied to the Masquerade treasure hunt. He explores why it may be the worst game ever made.

Matt Parker follows the community effort to speed up his slow Wordle-solving code, which ended up running hundreds of millions of times faster. He walks through the techniques contributors used.