Infinite Race is a mathematical racing game. Two players compete to move their piece the greatest distance along the number line by choosing how the dice will fall. However, the rolls must fit a distribution perfectly, so the player’s luck must revert to the mean. The strategy is to select a sequence of moves which allows one player to break free of the pack.
I’ve made an update to the Game of Ur - Background post. A reader took up my challenge to find a closed form solution for the number of valid game placements and found a solution.
This is a tale of finding fractals in an unexpected place and why the appearance makes sense in hindsight. I was looking for patterns in valid board game configurations, specifically the middle contesting row in the Game of Ur. In the game, there are eight slots either of the two players may occupy, but a slot may only be occupied by at most one player.
How to Solve It, but for operational incidents. Engineers with site reliability responsibilities are often faced with operational issues (incidents) that have an unknown cause and uncertain solution. How to Solve It is a classic work describing heuristics for solving mathematical problems. There have been adaptations of this book for different domains, but none yet for software-intensive operations.