No comments for a little while longer . . .

We're overdue for a Movable Type upgrade, and I don't have the time to get it taken care of immediately. Once it's done, comments will work again.

No Irish Republicans need apply

Around the corner and down the street, I see a new coffee shop is coming to the Brown University area. And it's called Blue State Coffee. OK, this is probably the bluest area of one of the bluest states, but it did get me wondering if this were tongue in cheek or seriously political. The Blue State Coffee website, however, leaves no doubt it's the latter.

Now I'm visualizing a throwback to centuries past, when coffeehouses were centers of political agitation, complete with brawling in the streets between patrons of rival establishments. Perhaps I should hasten to register the domain redstatecoffee.com? How about independentstatecoffee.com? A bit long, but more to my taste (sorry, I'm not much of a joiner).

Incidentally, here's a link to an article deflating the myth of "No Irish Need Apply" signs, at least here in the United States.

Checkers solved

Jonathan Schaeffer's quest for the perfect game of checkers has ended. . .

Schaeffer's proof, described today in Science (and freely available here for others to verify), would make checkers the most complex game yet solved by machines, beating out the checker-stacking game Connect Four in difficulty by a factor of a million. . .

So what game will fall to computers next? Schaeffer and colleagues speculate it will be Othello, an eight-by-eight disk-flipping game. Chess presents a far mightier challenge, but researchers are "in the realm of thinking about" solving it, Herik says, which he calls "a tremendous achievement."

The great white whale of games remains the Asian pastime Go. Although programs have recently become competitive with grand masters on nine-by-nine boards, they remain toothless on the full 19-by-19 game.