Having gotten the world record in the hardest version of Tetris, we promptly lost it again. This post tells the history of the HATETRIS world record as it rose from 86 points to 289, in three weeks.

A collection of Mathematica programs and rhymed poetry written for Advent of Code 2022. Highlights include the ballad of John Henry, an OSHA-approved fable, and a grammatically precarious treehouse.

HATETRIS is the world's hardest version of Tetris; it's Tetris that hates you. In this post, we chronicle our eleven-month journey to get the world record, and some of our wrong turns along the way.

Written while procrastinating on the longer HATETRIS post, and rereading Goethe's Faust. Three years of Advent of Code have taught me to cap off every programming project with a poem, so here it is.

From the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: The Moving Finger writes, and having writ / Moves on, nor all thy piety and wit / Shall lure it back to cancel half a line / Nor all thy tears erase one word of it.

A collection of Mathematica programs and rhymed poetry written for Advent of Code 2021. Highlights include a ten-page cave-diving text adventure game poem and the confessions of a polymer scientist.

2015 Day 6: Turn regions of a 1000x1000 grid of lights off and on again, and count how many are on at the end. After optimizing our brute-force, we explore other potential improvements and speedups.

From /r/WritingPrompts, a story of a mathematical ghost that won't leave, a girl who doesn't like him too much, an RSA-encrypted message that can't be decoded, and number theory that death can't end.

From /r/WritingPrompts, a bizarre short story from a bizarre prompt about every different country having its own personal Sun. Surprisingly, this story includes a wholly relevant GK Chesterton poem.

2015 Day 5: Count the number of strings, from a given list, which fit a number of strange syntax / character requirements. We don't find big optimizations, but at 2.4 milliseconds, we don't need to.