Wednesday, August 03, 2005 - Posts
So Germanfest ended Sunday night. I had a good day of cards at the Sheepshead tent. My brother joined me for hours 1pm, 2pm and 3pm. He had a golf game or something later. Ummmmmmm, hey bro, ummmmmm cards here. Where are your priorities? Actually, I didn't get his scores, but he won his 2pm table and got the pin and cards, so he's hooked for this tournament. For his 1pm round, he sat at a table with "Super Mario" Ray. Throw him to the wolves. Ray found out my brother hadn't played for 12 months and had him keep score. If you know how these tables are run, it is sometimes difficult enough to pay attention to the game, let alone keep score. Scoring is usually left to people that know the scoring and tournament rules. I usually score the table when I play, so you'd think I would cheat to get better scores than I showed on Saturday (my nickname among the nephews and nieces is "Uncle Knucklehead" because I purposely try to cheat in games and inevitably get caught; all in fun). Ray made sure my brother got his head in the game early. Once again, Ray is the man because not only is he a good Sheepshead player, but he gets everyone to play at their best. After scoring the first few games, my brother said he was "totally on his game" (I added the totally; my brother doesn't talk like that). By the way, I saw Ray's closing personal tally: +134 winning the 9pm closing round.
Before I forget, the lower cased one stopped by the tourney, but since spectators are not allowed in the main area, he took off where he and his wife concubine chick TS presumably drank large quantities of beer and consumed considerable confectionaries (Germans have that dessert thing down to an ART). I didn't notice him. He mentioned yesterday that he felt uncomfortable standing in a place that had the words "Sheep" and "Head" prominently displayed on more than one sign and had to leave.
These are my Sunday Tourney scores. Higher is better:
|
Time Slot |
My Score |
My Cumulative Score |
Remarks |
| 1pm |
+11 |
+11 |
Ok start for the day. |
|
2pm |
+3 |
+14 |
|
| 3pm |
-7 |
+7 |
I'm the big sausage boy for my table. Put my head in a vise. |
| 4pm |
+3 |
+10 |
|
| 5pm |
+4 |
+14 |
|
| 6pm |
- 0 - |
+14 |
Hmmm. Same hourly score as 6pm Saturday. Coincidence or causal? Lit my Macanudo, but realized that Lynn was asthmatic and had to let it burn out until later. |
| 7pm |
+16 |
+30 |
Won the table. Lynn at the table again. When do I get my cigar time? |
| 8pm |
-5 |
+25 |
Second losing round of the day and it is almost quitting time. Nice. |
| 9pm |
+3 |
+28 |
Jerry and Ken were hilarious. I've got to play more Sheepshead with these guys. |
So I ended +28 for the day and +30 for the two days that I participated.
Math time (no, for you parents of little kids, I didn't say bath time)
So if you look carefully at the scores as I present them and the tournament payoffs, something simple comes to light. Since players come and go as they please and it would be difficult to tally all cumulative scores for everyone and somehow normalize them for all 29 hours, one-hour scoring is used. Every one-hour tournament is scored independently. Essentially, there is a payoff for being an outlier for the period. There is no payoff for being a consistent player, i.e. having consistent winning scores over each period for 29 periods. Furthermore, the Grand Prize payoff is a random selection from the hourly winners, so there is no skill in winning the Grand Prize. I'm not complaining, I'm just making an observation. The only opportunity to improve your chance of winning the Grand Prize is to win more one-hour tournaments so that your name is in the final drawing more than once. So I spend my weekend playing a game that only has a payoff if I'm THE biggest outlier and even if I am, I'm not guaranteed the Grand Prize of the tournament even if I have the overall high score for all of the hourly tournaments. I don't consider myself mathematically-challenged, but now after a second look here, I wonder. Time for some game theory.
Of course, if I had won the Grand Prize, I'd find some math to support my win, explaining that OF COURSE I WAS THE BEST PLAYER THERE. Lynn won the Grand Prize. So, Lynn, if you are out there, thanks for making me wait on my one vice of the tournament: smoking my stogies. Thanks as well for stealing winning the Grand Prize. Actually, congrats. I played at four tables with Lynn and at every table, she was a fine Sheepshead player.
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If you would like to learn Sheepshead, google it. If you want a pick-up game and are in the Milwaukee area and don't mind a big old mauer in the game, click here.
I noticed that King Fahd of Saudi Arabia died (funeral coverage here). Prince Abdullah (a very wealthy son) takes over after actually being the Prince in power since 1995. With all of the tumoil in Iraq and Afganistan and all of the events in the Middle East, this story is getting very little coverage. Discuss amongst yourselves.
So The Kid and I just got back from my birthday dinner at the local steak joint. She's been a vegetarian for about 20 months, but lately has been trying a few bites of meat. Good girl. Have some more prime rib. It's ok not to be vegetarian and convert back to the flesh-eating carnivore that you are. Animals taste yummy. Actually, she had a bite of a friend's cheeseburger the other day, and wanted another bite, but her friend wouldn't share anymore. We went to a local CD store afterwards where I picked up some Dieselboy and an old Funkadelic CD (don't ask if you don't know). I wanted a Corrosion of Conformity CD, but I couldn't remember which it was, so I bagged that. Lately, my music is all over the place: Edith Piaf, Gorillaz, Black Eyed Peas, KC and the Sunshine Band, John Coltrane. Thank God I don't listen to both kinds of music: Country & Western.
So my age this year, according to my sci-fi friends is the answer to the universe (reference to hitchhiking or something). I've gotta see the movie or read the book. Everyone recommends the book, but I didn't read it or have an interest in it back when I was younger. Maybe now I will. Douglas Adams and Douglas Hofstadter were two authors that I just didn't like. Must be a Doug thing. Julie Lerman mentions a guy with a different spelling of Dug and I like his stuff, so maybe it's the usage of the excess vowel (can never have enough lower cased o's; see the first letter of my moniker).
Anyways, let's get down to some basic math. Today's feature on the wikipedia is the G-Man . Someone over there must be celebrating my birthday to put up one of my favorites, second only to big Leo. So for the heathens out there, Johann Carl Friedrich Gauß pronounces his last name (gous) where the vowel phoneme rhymes with "owww" (not awww) and the funny looking S (like a Greek lower case beta or an English capital B) is an Eszett or scharfes S and sounds like a hard "s", as in "voice". I think the scharfes S is a fricative, palato-alveolar phoneme, but I don't have my favorite reference handy. But enough about phonology.
I like factoring (and not just integers). I'm also a rational points (on elliptic curves) guy. I don't like prime numbers. Everyone else studies them, so they are Corvette of Number Theory: Everyone wants one, they are fast and pretty, but they are just too common. Give me classes of composites anyday (and I abuse the term classes here as distinguished from the term in set theory).
This year's birthday, 42, factors as 2 x 3 x 7. 2005 factors as 5 x 401. So by the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic, the exponent vector of the prime decomposition of my age is the tuple <1, 1, 0, 1, . . .>. It (the exponent vector) has a sum of three, so it has a specific interest to me. I study numbers that are composed of only two or three prime numbers. While everyone studies the density of the primes, I study the composite-2 and composite-3 (my nomenclature as opposed to the clumsy terms almost prime or semiprime) numbers and densities and other properties.
If you aren't familiar with composite-2 numbers, they also are interesting in cryptology. The RSA private-public key cryptosystem is based on the ability to construct composite-2 numbers without the ability to factor them (in low-order polynomial time). Consider a large, 100-digit, base-10 composite-2 number that has been constructed for use in an RSA key. In order to maximize the cost of discovery of the key by an adversary in a brute force factorization (or any other factorization attack), the 100 digit number is composed of two prime numbers that are approximately 50 digits apiece. Consider for a moment if this condition were not met. For each decimal digit that one of the two factors was reduced, the search space would be reduced by the equivalent amount, i.e. instead of looking through numbers less than 10^50, I only need to look at numbers less than 10^49. This type of reduction while seemingly trivial could lead to reducing the time to find one of the factors.
Anyways, I spend a lot of time thinking about properties and densities and such of the composite-2 and composite-3 numbers.
Before I forget, I just received "Multiplicative Number Theory, Third Edition" by Harold Davenport (revisions by H.L. Montgomery). Since Davenport passed away in 1969, Dr. Montgomery (advised by Davenport; PhD awarded 1971 at the University of Cambridge) picked up the work in this book with appropriate revisions. I joked on The Armed Geometer's site in this post's comments about this book, but I'm actually reading Chapter 28 - Bombieri's Theorem. Number Theorists (of which I am not) that are not familiar with this book, should give it a look.
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If you actually have an opinion on topics discussed in this post, or I've misquoted something, let me know here.
Hey, it's my birthday and I'm 42 years old today. As I recall 42 years ago, Mom had a son. Dad wanted to name him Nigel. Mom wanted the name optionsScalper. True Story. Both Ma and Pa have since passed away, so I can't verify this, but that's how I remember it.
Anyways, I'm at work today like any other day. The Kid is going to take me out for a nice dinner somewhere after work tonight. Like Father's day, she has decided to buy a few more books for me as my present. I have already ordered (and have received) a few from Amazon and will be ordering the rest next week. Dexter Kozen's "Automata and Computability" and "Multiplicative Number Theory" by Harold Davenport are two among a few that I have gotten. I plan on getting "Automata Theory and its Applications" by Khoussainov and Nerode, both of Melvyn Nathanson's "Additive Number Theory" books and other books by Tarski, Kleene, Jech, Bollobas . . .
As my daughter had stated in the last post, "I am such a cool daughter to buy you those books." She is.
When Memorial Day arrived this year, I was on a tear and had high expectations for this summer, professionally, personally, intellectually but not socially. It hasn't met my expectations, but it has been a lot of fun. With about one month to go before school starts for The Kid, there is still plenty of time for my summer reading to continue.
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If you are older than me, share my birthday or have some other comment for me, contact me here.
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