Small code with powerful results, the occasional opinion … and beer. 

10 Nov 2015
The Beale Ciphers Solved! … or not?

When I was about 14 years old, I encountered one of the most fascinating puzzles in history: the Beale Ciphers. The Beale Ciphers are widely-known among treasure hunters. What are the Beale Ciphers?  It is a collection of three documents, each of which contained an encrypted message as a sequence of numbers.  The story goes that they were left by a […]

05 Dec 2011
Shakespeare was a Million Monkeys’ Uncle?

I received a wonderful email a few weeks ago about the Shakespeare Million Monkeys problem.  This problem is actually a statistical challenge embraced by the computing community, and solved with advanced computing techniques like parallelism.  The problem is described well in this Wikipedia article: Infinite Monkey Theorem (Wikipedia), Weasel Program, a similar concept (Wikipedia) There is also […]

02 Dec 2008
Einstein’s Challenge… are you in the 2% category

Einstein’s Challenge is something that I had heard sometime in my life, but never checked it out…until one of our developers emailed it to the development staff this week.  I was intrigued, since I love puzzles and deductive logic is my favorite brain exercise. If you want the puzzle itself, do three things: Be honest […]