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My roomba, Dobby, got stuck again.

This is from the Daily Coding Problem email list. The owners of that list haven’t sent out a problem that caught my imagination in quite a while.

Daily Coding Problem: Problem #1553 [Hard]

This problem was asked by Airbnb.

You come across a dictionary of sorted words in a language you’ve never seen before. Write a program that returns the correct order of letters in this language.

For example, given ['xww', 'wxyz', 'wxyw', 'ywx', 'ywz'], you should return ['x', 'z', 'w', 'y'].

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Github repo for my solution. Feel free to look it over, try it and email me (bediger8@gmail.com) if you notice anything.

Oh look! A knights and knaves puzzle in a low rent kid’s funny papers strip. Can we solve this puzzle with the method of Raymond Smullyan’s Og and Bog problem? Let’s find out.

As a kid, there was absolutely nothing better than convincing my mom to buy some Lucky Charms brand frosted toasted oat cereal & marshmallows.

Conquest of the Moon (Viking Press, 1953, Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, Fred Whipple) describes a lunar expedition that could be accomplished with the technology of 1950.

Von Braun and company left no detail unexamined. One of the less obvious categories that they put a lot of effort into is navigation, or in this context, astrogation.

I just read a short note, Earliest Triassic ichthyosaur fossils push back oceanic reptile origins, from Current Biology 33:159-179, March 2023, Benjamin Kear, Victoria Engelschion, Oyvind Hammer, Aubrey Roberts, Jorn Hurum.

Back when my kids were still young and innocent enough to want to go trick-or-treating, for a few years we went to some suburban friends cul-de-sac-filled neighborhood.

Bought some nail clippers from Amazon. The package had a SHIPPING SRAL

I ran across an engineering aphorism or principle called “Gall’s Law”:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.