Guus Bosman

It's been a while since we had such an easy Sunday. Late breakfast, coffee... and now catching up with some magazines and books to read.

The wind is really strong here; happy we don't have to go outside.

As you can see on the Haarlem webcam the Grote Market is completely empty.

On the Spaarne the waves have white heads, just like the sea.

Oma Bosman has a birthday today and we went to see her. My parents will pick up Ettie from the airport tonight, but she just called that her plane has a 2 hours delay.

So that means that we have to fill the time till 04.00 o'clock. Guess what we'll play... Steden & Ridders of course.

I found this interesting article on Slashdot today. Three mathematicians at MIT proved that Tetris is NP-complete to solve. That is: if you know in advance the exact order the pieces will fall, it is NP-complete (ie: there is no smart algorithm for it) to maximize your score. The original article is here, it's quite readable for non-mathematicians too.

In the past similar results have been established for other games (for example Minesweeper). Pacman however, has 1 perfect solution (to eat every dot, every energizer, every blue man and every fruit up to and including board 256 will give you a total of 3,333,360 points).

Just came back from Utrecht. I saw four lectures of different companies all working with embedded technology, and on the open questions they still face. The one I liked the most was about automatic vehicles, steered electronically.

The afternoon sessions were more commercially oriented, not so interesting for me personally now. I took the proceedings from this year and 2001; there were some articles worth reading.