New Florence. New Renaissance.

Game Theory

I was reading this Popular Science interview with Les Fisher who uses the Rock, Paper, Scissor game to explain more complex game theory...and I drifted into the site of the World RPS Society and I was fascinated to learn

"The Paper Scissors Stone Club was founded in London, England in 1842 immediately following the issuance of the1842 law declaring “any decision reached by the use of the process known as Paper Scissors Stone between two gentleman acting in good faith shall constitute a binding contract. Agreements reached in this manner are subject to all relevant contract and tort law.”

The next generation of programmers

New Scientist (sub required)

"Anyone who has struggled with the complexities of C++ or Java knows that writing software is not usually child's play. To develop user-friendly Scratch, the researchers watched how children create and learn with Lego building blocks. Users do not have to write complicated code, but instead drag and "snap together" colourful graphical building blocks, each of which represents a simple programming instruction, such as making a character move 10 steps forward, play a sound, or repeat previous actions."

"Last week teachers and researchers from across the world met the software's creators at the Scratch@MIT conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to share ideas and experiences. "Children are creating whole new genres of projects that we had not even imagined," says Resnick."

Another unplanned benefit:

"Kimberley Scott, who runs the Compugirls project (in Arizona), says women often drop out of computer sciences, mainly because they dislike programming. "Scratch is a visually pleasing, easy way to introduce programming to our students," she says. "Research clearly shows girls like to collaborate on projects. I know girls on our programme like the fact there is an online community where they can look at other people's projects and post comments."