Ken's blog

Create a mockumentary about the "serious" problem of endorphin addiction, treating it as if it were an illegal drug like heroin. P...

Build a house with lots of concealed passageways and hidden rooms.  Who has the knowhow for this kind of architecture and engineering?  Is i...

The conceptually simple cipher of treating a message as a long number in one base and converting it to a different base does not appear amon...

The numeral 0 is decimal 48 in ASCII, so encode base 100 with unsigned char values 48-147, achieving 2x better text compression compared to ...

Create a filesystem backed by files in other filesystems.  However, unlike the simple way of allocating a single file and creating and mount...

View a list data structure as a filesystem.  Running 'ls' gives the files numbered 0, 1, ...  Or in base 256 depending on what optio...

Peace and love are not two distinct concepts but one and the same.  Those who think they see peace but not love with it are not actually see...

The traditional scientific method mantra goes, theories or hypotheses can only be disproven, not proven. However, if we include the ever-p...

Devise a selfmate in 1 chess position which also maximizes the number of direct mate in 1 moves available.  You had many ways to win, but yo...

This was on a freshly installed and dist-updated i386 Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal . apt-get install --no-install-recommends xmonad libghc-x...

A standard chess problem format is Mate in N.  Mate in N+1 is not considered a solution. The dual problem type is to avoid mate in N, succ...

Create a computer program which will defend chess problems, e.g., mate in N, against you, making sure to make you play against all possible ...

For each position of a chess game, compute the number of moves, or proportion of moves, that do not lead to being checkmated.  Probably done...

Search for chess positions for which the computer evaluation radically changes depending on the depth of search.  Classify each by tactical ...

Create a 120-sided disdyakis triacontahedral die as the sphere-like die with the largest number of faces.  Anything larger is either cylindr...

What would the earth be like if one side constantly faced the sun? In particular, how effectively would the oceans and atmosphere redistri...

Water curiously expands when it freezes into ice.  Can we extract energy from this effect?  I'm imagining a piston driving a linear gene...

Create a robot to set up a Rube Goldberg device.  The robot makes thousands of attempts, far more than a human would have patience for, to c...

While it may be fun to listen to a single smart speaker give a polished speech, it might be better for your personal growth to listen to a d...

Consider an on screen keyboard that not only provides letters but also common words like "the". If a user types T H in sequence,...