My reign as king of Riddler Nation (or more specifically, of their Colonel Blotto game) continues, although Nate Bailey made it way too close for comfort. I look forward to our rematch when Oliver Roeder stages the next tournament. fivethirtyeight.com/features/can-t…

If you have some spare computing power, it's very easy to point it toward this project!

Boom! Team "Ubuntu Podcast" are #2 on the #superpermutations chart! :D ada.mscsnet.mu.edu/ChaffinMethodR… lukas.tadaa-data.de/superperms/lea… #DistributedChaffinMethod

Team Ubuntu Podcast hit #1 on the #superpermutations thing none of us can adequately explain! Ubuntu Podcast: 683316 Reykjavik: 683303 #DistributedChaffinMethod ada.mscsnet.mu.edu/ChaffinMethodR…

Woo-hoo! ada.mscsnet.mu.edu/ChaffinMethodR… Congrats to Reykjavik, who just found the optimal string for n=6 with 116 wasted characters! It contains 621 permutations in a string of 742 digits.

Please consider signing this petition, which asks the Computer and Information Sciences department at the University of Strathclyde to reconsider their plan to eliminate their Combinatorics group and fire its faculty members.

FastDCM is a client for the Distributed Chaffin Method search that uses the GPU rather than the CPU for its calculations. Depending on the precise specifications of your system, it might run several times faster than one instance of the single-CPU client. github.com/superpermutato…

AMS Special Session on Analytic and Probabilistic Combinatorics, organized by Miklós Bóna, FLORIDA and Jay Pantone Jay Pantone, Marquette University, buff.ly/2z8YW4P #JMM2020

A message from Jay Pantone: On Thu 27 Feb, around 15:00 GMT, the supermutations.net server will be briefly down while Marquette's IT department installs new networking hardware. Depending on how long that downtime lasts, some clients may disconnect and need to be restarted.

Our sysadmin just confirmed that the upgrade was successful. About 60 clients disconnected while the server was unreachable. Those clients should have no trouble reconnecting now. The search continues!

The French version of Scientific American, on superpermutations. pourlascience.fr/sd/mathematiqu…

26th International Conference on Applications of Computer Algebra is online and it is free. It will start this Friday. I suggest at the very least checking the program, and the book of abstracts: aca2021.sba-research.org Watch #math talks instead of YouTube over this weekend. 😛

My submission for #ThisWeeksRiddler at FiveThirtyEight. Jay Pantone and I found there are 322 ways to finish the race in the shortest possible time (12 moves). I went easy on @xaqwg and submitted only this one. It travels the shortest Euclidean distance (not that that matters).

Thanks to "Oh sht, this is a Nazi bar now"’s support with Charity Engine, it’s now known that the longest string of digits 1-6, such that only 121 of the digits fail to add a substring comprising a new permutation, is 643 digits long. For 122, 648 is shown, 649 to be ruled out. supermutations.net/ChaffinMethodR…

Over 15 years ago, I wrote a blog post with some formulas involving maximal self-avoiding walks (njohnston.ca/2009/05/on-max…). At the end of last month, Jay Pantone et al posted a paper that improves upon those results in ridiculously impressive ways (arxiv.org/abs/2407.18205).

Marquette Stadium, the new 24,000-seat home of the Marquette University Golden Avalanche, opens in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.