Fun Stuff

Peanuts Trivia Quizzes
 Search Peanuts comic strips
Peanuts reruns date conversion chart
Peanuts: Years in review [1997] [1998] [1999] [2000] [2001]
Peanuts Books Wishlist
Peanuts Collector Club Homepage
[Luann] [For Better or For Worse] [Pearls Before Swine] [Cul de Sac] [Off The Mark] [xkcd]
[Peanuts] [FoxTrot] [Bound and Gagged] [Between Friends] [Bizarro] [Sherman’s Lagoon] [Zits]
Pseudoku puzzles (i.e., Sudoku variants) that I composed for G4G7 (the 7th Gathering for Gardner)
Wei-Hwa Huang’s Sudoku Sledgehammer
The Onion, LarkNews (defunct, unfortunately), and some Christian news satire of my own
Some poems that I’ve written
A premise for a movie that I would love to see made
Goodman’s original definition of grue
Math in the Movies
Rec.humor.funny archive (jokes; some are offensive)
Look up words at Online Webster or OneLook
Comparison shop for books at Bookfinder or AddALL or BooksPrice
What does your phone number spell?
Urban Legends
Foreign currency exchange rates
Dylan’s Hakka Homepage
English/Chinese test
Hobbies: [Chess] [Othello] [Badminton] [Juggling] [Inversions: Scott Kim and John Langdon]
Downloadable Othello programs (the best is WZebra)
Othello Java applets (the best ones are Booby Reversi, Reversi V2.4, and Panda Reverse)
Second Chance Cinema


My Chess Problems

I have composed a few unusual chess problems. In Ein Kleines Schach, the game is played on a Klein bottle (click here for the solutions).

The remaining problems take place on a standard board, but for the next two problems, you need to know what “free-capture chess” is. In free-capture chess, you may capture not only your opponent’s units, but your own units as well (except that your own units do not check or capture your own king).

The problem below was first published as problem F159 in Problemesis 33. White to move and mate in 2 (free-capture chess).



The next problem, whose composition was a collaborative effort with Philip Lin, was first published in 2003, as F0149 in issue SG23 of StrateGems magazine. It has two parts. Part (a) is a helpmate in 2 (i.e., Black and White cooperate to checkmate Black after each player makes two moves, with Black moving first); standard rules of chess apply. Part (b) is also a helpmate in 2, with exactly the same position, but with the free-capture rule in force.



For the 1996 MIT Mystery Hunt, I composed the following problem. Find the shortest legal chess game that results in the position below.



For the 2013 MIT Mystery Hunt, I composed the two positions below. In each case, determine if the position could arise in a legally played chess game, and if so, whose turn it is to play. (These problems were also reprinted in the Puzzle Corner of MIT Technology Review, in the May/June 2018 and July/August 2019 issues respectively.)

    

In 1987, John Beasley introduced a fairy condition called fuddled men: a piece (or pawn) cannot move two times in succession; having moved, he must remain stationary for a move before being able to move again (and, while immobilized, he can neither check nor pin). The two positions below illustrate the fuddled men concept. On the left, it is White to move and mate in 2; I composed it myself before discovering that it had been almost anticipated by Ronald Turnbull (see position 4 in this article), but my version has some new features. The position on the right is a PG9.5, meaning that White has just made his 10th move of the game, and you must reconstruct how the game went. It is a joint composition with Noam Elkies, who cooked and corrected my first attempt.

    

For more information about chess problems, see the chess problem glossary from Problemesis:
[Basic] [Stipulations] [Themes] [Types of pieces] [Fairy pieces] [Common conditions] [Constraints] [Other conditions]


Backgammon

Chow’s Checkerplay Challenge #1
Chow’s Checkerplay Challenge #2
Chow’s Checkerplay Challenge #3
One-page summary of backgammon opening replies
Rollouts of positions from Robertie’s 501 Essential Backgammon Problems
Rollouts of positions from Wiggins’s Boards, Blots, and Double Shots
Are there undefined equities in backgammon?
Equities for Murat’s Hypestgammon: [C source code] [Backgammon value = 1] [Backgammon value = 2]
Test your ability to estimate EPC
Clever backgammon puzzles by Bill Davis and Ed Collins
Notes by Stick: [EPC Part 1] [EPC Part 2] [EPC Quiz] [Racing Cubes]
Peever backgame quiz (Memorial Day 2013)
Nigel Merrigan’s Dual E-Pip/Metric Formula for gauging races
“Naccel” pip-counting (cached from BGOnline; internal links may not work): FAQ 1 2 3 3x 4 4x 5 5x 6 6x 7 8 8x 9 10 11 12 12x
Backgammon stoplight charts
Tough backgammon quizzes by “Othello” Itikawa and others
Motif Backgammon
Stick’s Backgammon Forum (use this page to make diagrams for posting on Stick’s forum) Some of my favorite posts:

Puzzles

MIT IAP Mystery Hunt (perhaps the world’s best team competition)
Rec.puzzles archive (lots of classic chestnuts)
Puzzle World (mechanical puzzles)
Puzzle Solver (mechanical puzzle solutions)
The Grey Labyrinth (new puzzles all the time!)
Mathpuzzle.com (puzzles with strong mathematical content)
Non-chess retrograde analysis (a small selection of highly original puzzles)
Gathering for Gardner


Where I Got My Gifs

When I downloaded free GIFs from these sites, I agreed to link to them from my own page. However, their URLs seem to keep changing. I try to keep up with this constant flux, but sometimes it’s impossible. In one case the site seems to have been absorbed into a larger entity, so I have dropped it from this list.

[Image-O-Rama] [Anthony’s WWW Images] [The Graphic Station]

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