c4countdown

Paul Howe

Can we have a write-in candidate? (actually, now I look at it it's not as exciting as it felt) edit: yes, yes, like my mom/penis/whatever I did agonise about that one, but I'm following a fairly strict policy of limiting things to 5 games so it didn't quite make the cut :( . Something I'm consideri...

Paul Howe

I'm getting a bit bored with Deal or No Deal. 15-to-1 was much better, loads of the great quizzers on there. I think they changed the instant nominate back, because of the intimidating Martin Riley (sp), anyone who nominated him, he would nominate them back straight away (after answering his questi...

Paul Howe

This week's GOTW brings you the best of Aptobash II. Apologies if you played in an amazing non-aptobash game last week, and for the delay in getting the poll up. Normal GOTW service will resume on Sunday. Bevins v Simmonds - Biggest cunting of the tournament in terms of score differential as the rel...

Paul Howe

But why is it so sporadic in the later evening? Is it due to breaks in TV shows? Or a frankly amateurish approach to statistics which has only taken one day's data? Or even better still, perhaps it is down to the intermittent working of Apterous? More likely that the trend is much flatter in the ev...

Paul Howe

My wife Carol has been invited to audition at 1130 at the marriot hotel in Bristol. Anyone else likely to be there? Weird, by a strange coincidence I actually was there last night. On a non-Countdown related endeavour, unfortunately. It's pretty nice, if you're getting the train go to Temple Meads ...

Paul Howe · Re: Spoilers and comments for Wednesday 18/02/2009 Excellent game, well done.

Excellent game, well done.

Paul Howe

Ian Volante wrote:This one maybe, a good battle:

http://www.apterous.org/viewgame.php?game=27079

Mind you, is the GOTW falling by the wayside?

No! There will eventually be an aptobash GOTW special, and this week's is running as normal. Just very busy atm.

Paul Howe

Captain Kirk is a legend, Jono's a good sort, and Martin Gardner is an utter fucking twat.* *If I was joking, this is where I'd let you know. You probably never saw the thread where this joke came from. I think if you knew the context you wouldn't be offended, but ah well. I wasn't offended, I was ...

Paul Howe

Right, after puzzling over this for a bit I think I agree with David. We're looking for P(Bob rolls a six on his second turn | Bob won). Such an expression is begging for Bayes rule to be applied to it, which gives P(Bob won| bob rolled a six on his second turn)*P(Bob rolls a six on his second turn)...

Paul Howe

Captain Kirk is a legend, Jono's a good sort, and Martin Gardner is an utter fucking twat.*

*If I was joking, this is where I'd let you know.

Paul Howe

I'm having quite serious problems atm. Can log in OK, and everything starts well but very quickly things grind to a halt (white screens, letters suddenly appearing all at once giving you two seconds to do the round, clock taking ages to go round, laggy chat etc) and eventually things freeze up compl...

Paul Howe

Assume you can do it for a square of side 2^n, with one corner square left blank. Fit three of these squares together with the blank squares adjacent and fill them with another L shape. Insert the fourth square such that its blank square faces outwards. Then, by . . . I couldn't puzzle out exactly ...

Paul Howe

How do you prove this mathematically? Telling you that would pretty much give away the whole puzzle! You're not going to like it, but the thread topic is a big hint about how you should proceed :) I'm off to get my hair chopped off now, I'll come back to this thread when I've recovered my strength....

Paul Howe

This bit...

Kirk Bevins wrote:Drawing a simple diagram then of a 16 square chessboard and trying to fit 5 of these L-shapes on is impossible.

isn't right.

Paul Howe

Paul didn't say anything like that. He was just giving an example of a real-life statement of the form "if A then B" which anyone would agree with (pedantry notwithstanding) without agreeing that A is actually true. It's basically impossible to come up with an implication of this kind whi...

Paul Howe

All induction says is that if you can reach the first rung of a ladder, and that if you know that from any rung of the ladder you can reach the next rung, then you can climb the whole ladder - all you've done there is shown that you can climb the first 3 rungs. "If the sun goes supernova, all ...

Paul Howe

Don't worry Charlie, think everyone had a good time regardless and appreciates all the effort you put in. Quite relieved from a personal perspective, as I think I'd have ended up blagging my way into the final and feeling wretched about it. I didn't realise Dinos was still in contention when I took ...

Paul Howe

In an induction proof, we 1)Prove an implication by assuming the statement is true. I liked all that post, Paul, except this bit. How can you "assume" the statement is true when it may not be. I cringe every time I hear the word "assume" and scream. Because you're trying to esta...

Paul Howe

No it isn't . What we are trying to prove is that, if the expression is true for k, then it's also true for k+1. There's a difference. No. My original question was "Prove that n(n+1) is positive". Let me have a stab at this. induction proofs are sneaky as your goal is not to prove a state...

Paul Howe

I got on earlier, but couldn't challenge anyone, and there were 6 Jim Bentleys. I assumed Charlie was engaged in a spot of social engineering, so left him alone to work on his dream of creating a perfect society. Top tip: You'll need at least 20 Jims to make it work. And absolutely no Bolases, Sudbe...

Paul Howe

But compared to Kirk, or Conor, or you Paul, or so many others- then I am very average indeed. And at least 2 of those 3 have some Irish DNA ;) . Although I'm only half Irish, which explains why I'm not as good as Conor or Paul Gallen. Anyway, I've been impressed by your performances on apterous. H...

Paul Howe

Nooooooooooo, just bottled the chance to rack up an absolutely titanic speedgoat score. Brain completely froze when I had to pick in rd 10, spotted UMLAUT in rd 12 only to belatedly realise I'd picked the wrong letter, somehow convinced myself 33*25 equalled 725 and then topped it all off with a lud...

Paul Howe

I've selected an inverted T With the target one hundred and three Six plus five is eleven And times by the seven... Oh no, sorry, I've gone wrong. Not enough appreciation for this one :D There are some good efforts in the xkcd limerick database . Many are deeply nerdy and some don't make sense with...

Paul Howe

I don't think I've ever been more annoyed playing countdown than after I threw this one away. Even did a little fist pump after I "solved" the conundrum.

Paul Howe

I mentioned Fibonacci numbers in an earlier post, and dismissed them, but I can't think of a counterexample for any set of Fibonacci coins (e.g. [1,2,3,5,8] is one possible set, [1,2,3,5,8,13,21] is another), so maybe they do work.

Over to you, Gary.

Paul Howe

Bump for those who haven't seen it.

Paul Howe

Just one point away from a max = metamax speedgoat

http://www.apterous.org/viewgame.php?game=25737

And, bragging on Prime's behalf, I think this is the best picking I've ever faced

http://www.apterous.org/viewgame.php?game=25735

Paul Howe

Oh...and what's the knapsack problem? http://tinyurl.com/bdvl53 Haha, awesome. Thinking about this some more, finding the fewest coins to make change for any particular amount is a special instance of the knapsack problem (all the "weights" are 1, and we're subject to an equality constrai...

Paul Howe

Charlie Reams wrote:
Simon Myers wrote:- best goatdown pickers
Ta-dah and ta-dum!

I think this mainly reveals that the bots are way too good at picking.

Please keep it that way! Well, you can mess with the others, but don't fuck with Prime

Cool stats btw.

Paul Howe

Paul Howe wrote: I believe that coins with Fibonacci values might work using roughly the same argument, I'm a bit tentative on that one though.

Actually, scrap that bit, it's turd. The rest I think is OK.

Paul Howe

I think Howard's idea always gives a set of coins for which the greedy algorithm is optimal. An x-pence coin will be a multiple of all the coins of lower value, so it's impossible to write a number greater than x as a sum of the lower coin values without a subset of that sum equalling x. Note this w...

Paul Howe

In the words of Joseph Bolas, youse know what to do.

Paul Howe

This was a difficult poll to compile, there were many good candiates and it wasn't easy to narrow it down. So far my favourite game has always gone on to win, but I'm at a loss to predict this week. Jim Bentley vs Eoin Monaghan - A new speed 9 record, and a rollocking contest to boot. Eoin is Irish,...

Paul Howe

Does your mum like Rachel too? If so, you know what to do.

Paul Howe

Sweet.

Paul Howe

This might be a trifle unfair to put this in here on behalf of Simon but in round 4 I screamed for a final C for COUNTDOWN. Simon didn't spot it and the rare opportunity went past. To date no letters game has had COUNTDOWN as a max. http://www.apterous.org/viewgame.php?game=24869 He mugged you on r...

Paul Howe

Cheers for all the recommendations chaps, some real crackers so far this week, keep them coming.

And nothing wrong with vanilla games at all!

Paul Howe

There's also Goodwood in March (as you'd know if you'd listened to the podcast) I haven't heard the podcast, but it's the Cheltenham Festival that normally causes a four day interruption in March. Glorious Goodwood is later in the year, July/August. In 2008, Goodwood caused no problem, as Countdown...

Paul Howe

How odd, as they seem (and I hope this isn't privileged info, but I wasn't told that it was, and I can't see why it should be) to be recording it at the end of April. Turnaround from recording to airing is normally quicker? Is there likely to be a gap at some point in the current series, for racing...

Paul Howe

Callum Laddiman wrote:http://www.apterous.org/viewgame.php?game=24210 Yay!

That game was actually a lot of fun, I don't think Unlimited gets the exposure it deserves.

You only won because of a typo though

Paul Howe

In light of this....

http://www.apterous.org/viewgame.php?game=24204

the previous recommendations seem completely irrelevant.

Paul Howe

http://www.apterous.org/viewgame.php?game=24197

I got two and almost got some others, which is pretty decent for someone who's French vocab extends to "je ne comprends pas"

Paul Howe

Bumpety bump - Not many votes so far

Paul Howe

Ben Wilson wrote: Erm, it's in two weeks mate.

Oh dear, complete and utter reading comprehension failure. I'm afraid I might find myself dodging various impromptu projectiles if I announced I was playing scrabble on that particular Saturday, so it's going to have to be a no. Sorry mate

Paul Howe

Ben, I'm having difficulty believing the website photo is truly representative of normal tournament scrabblers :? Anyway, put me down as a provisional yes, but I won't be able to confirm for another month or so while I finalise travel plans. Can't say I've ever been that interested in scrabble, but ...

Paul Howe

Dinos Sfyris wrote: Fraid you've got the wrong letters. It was AEIRTMTSA

AMARETTI + S = ???????

.
.
.
.
..
.
.

METATARSI (making the possibly false assumption from the posts so far that it wasn't mentioned on the show)

Paul Howe

Junaid Mubeen vs Apterous Prime - I like this game. Note Junaid's excellent pick in the final letters round (or did he just run out of time?) and nimble conundrum spot to redeem a seemingly lost position. http://www.apterous.org/viewgame.php?game=23109 Charlie Reams vs Nick Wainwright - The key her...

Paul Howe

Somehow I have the longest run of numbers games where I couldn't be beaten, measuring from the first appearance. I'm sure someone else has a longer run from an arbitrary start point. Also I am probably one of few people to come up with a 9-letter word that hadn't made it into the ODE :D 3 times for ...

Paul Howe

Congratulations Steve on a victory your performances deserved, and hard luck to Charlie, but you'll always have the glory of the superb performance that got you to the final. And congratulations to all the participants both for the high standard, and for the spirit and warmth in which the whole tour...

Paul Howe

aka the please do my job for me thread.

Paul Howe

My game didn't make it. :( I would say fair enough because it was rather flat but I think Matthew Green would probably hunt me down and kill me like the dog I am. http://apterous.org/viewgame.php?game=22057 I only have time to look at a small fraction of the games on apterous. I try and view games ...

Paul Howe

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.....

Well in Charlie, that was immense. And hard luck Jon, another series 54er falling at the semi-final stage

I have to say that whatever Damian's got in mind to replace the CofC would have to be pretty awesome to top the last 3 weeks.

Paul Howe

rayfolwell wrote:UNTHREAD in R3?

Yeah, that's fine, nice one.

Paul Howe

(100-25+8)*9+1

Paul Howe

In no particular order, Shawshank Redemption, City of God, Twelve Monkeys, LA Confidential, Leon, the first Matrix film, The Usual Suspects, Dr Strangelove etc etc, Being John Malkovich, The Big Lebowski. Actually more like a list of the first ten decent films I could think of. And Jono's right abou...

Paul Howe

Nick did a lot of choosing vowels especially after he got a 9. This would stop either contestant getting a 9 and would be in his interest. I do not like it. If I see what I see is really happening, I am so not impressed I am going off countdown a wee bit. I would be really relieved to be put right ...

Paul Howe

I met Conor Travers when he was about 13 as he came to COLIN and won two games out of six. About a year later, he won a whole series averaging 110 points a game. :shock: That is amazing how you go from a mediocre Countdowner to possibly the greatest of all time in such a small amount of time. I sup...

Paul Howe

Matt Morrison wrote: Thanks Michael but the only bit I wanted to know about, the reference to Ancient Rome, was the only bit you didn't explain!

It's just a clue to use Latin, Dexter being Latin for right.

Paul Howe

Craig Beevers wrote:Presumably OSMUNDA isn't in but maybe PIPETTE is?

OSMUNDA is actually fine, and I can't see why PIPETTE wouldn't be.

Really enjoyable game again, great 9 from Nick at a crucial moment, and it's been fantastic to see Kai doing so well.

Paul Howe

I quite like posting words I'm particularly proud of, but have difficulty justifying it as more than a minor ego boost. However, what truly annoys me is having to wade through a pile of alternative numbers solutions that aren't particularly neat or interesting, just different, for a game that's alre...

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