Yay! I’ve fixed the Search function so it works. I hadn’t changed the action tag to read "{$Smarty.server.PHP_SELF}", which it needed to be in order to work.
What I want to do now is make the previous and next page links not have the words previous post, and next post, just the title and the double-arrows.
Also, the Latest Posts does not seem to be updating…I’ll try to fix this.
Tue 24th May 2005
This was written in response to a Year 12 Philosophy essay, title “The Probability of Existence”, early in 2004. I’m posting it here, as I thought I’d already sone so, but was unable to find it.
There seems to me to be little doubt that, in some sense, we exist. Since, as Descartes suggested, the fact we can think, we must exist. Cogito ergo sum.
But what of the idea of our type of existence? Is our perception of our environment real? Is our environment real? On first appearance, as Chas suggests, we observe reality, and there must be truth to it. Or, on closer examination, there must be some kind of existence. According to logic, something must either have a quality, or not have a quality. This seems reasonable, but in fact such a simple proposition can lead to a paradox.
(more…)
The Advertiser, great newspaper as it is (that was sarcasm) has been plugging Sudoku puzzles of late. For the uninitiated, a sudoku puzzle is a 9×9 grid, that is broken up into 9 smaller 3×3 squares.
Each row, column, and 3×3 grid contains all of the digits 1-9, and (obviously) each row, column and small grid contains each digit only once. The trick is to work out which ones go where.
It’s all about logic, and working out which digits will not fit. So, I thought I would write a small python program to do it. I was prompted to do this by a puzzle I was working on on the way home, and I thought to myself “this puzzle appears to not have enough information for me to continue”. So, I started marking 9 marks in each box, showing which values could fit and not fit into each box. This was time consuming, but should be easy enough to do programmatically.
Once you have this down, it’s simple to see if there are any boxes where only one value can go, or any rows, columns or squares where there is only once slot a particular digit can fit. And my program did just this. (I actually made an object-oriented one, that uses classes for cells, and puzzles, and methods for checking rows, columns, squares, etc).
But, I seem to be missing one logical leap. The first puzzle I tried got solved with a few iterations of my program, but the other two I brought home get stuck. And one of these was one I solved earlier today, so I cannot recall how I was able to make the leap of logic my program cannot.
Thanks to the fantastic new filter at school which blocks any blogger blogs (http://*.blogspot.com), I can’t post to the csta website, so I’ll write the draw in here instead.
