Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

Since Snakes and Ladders is nothing but a Absorbing Markov chain, the results are exactly the same as for that general problem.

www.jstor.org/stable/3619261: How Long Is a Game of Snakes and Ladders? by Althoen, King and Schilling (1993), paywalled.

www-thphys.physics.ox.ac.uk/people/AndreiStarinets/sr_mt_2022.html (archive) contains 2022 problem sets and notes, well done Mr Andrei Starinets!

www-pnp.physics.ox.ac.uk/~barra/teaching.shtml As of 2023, contains some good 2015 materials: web.archive.org/web/20220525094139/http://www-pnp.physics.ox.ac.uk/~barra/teaching.shtml It was called "Subatomic physics" back then.

2015 professor: Alan J. Barr.

Possible 2022 professor: Guy Wilkinson (unconfirmed): www.chch.ox.ac.uk/staff/professor-guy-wilkinson

Reference indexer web interface implementation of ordinal ruleset inscriptions.

Source code presumably at: github.com/ordinals/ord

Viewing tip: plaintext inscriptions and some HTML pages don't show well on the preview window, but you can view them well by clicking on "content". E.g.:

This was the original name of Google Search.

One wonders if this name has some influence from the LGBT culture in San Francisco! The sexual innuendo is palpable.

"Back" is of course a reference to "backlinks", since Google Search relies on incoming links (AKA backlinks) to a webpage to determine its importance.

This is one of Ciro Santilli's most important principles.

Steve Jobs has a great quote about this. He's totally right on this one!

Decide your goal first, and then do whatever is needed to how to reach it.

Don't start randomly learning tech, because that means you will waste a lot of time learning useless stuff.

There is of course some level chicken-and-egg paradox in this, as highlighted by Dilbert, since choosing an achievable goal in the first place requires some level of technical understanding.

However, it is much more common that people will get way too involved in learning useless stuff and lose sight of the useful end goals.

Rather, take an iterative approach:

There is some truth to the counter argument that "but if you don't spend a lot of time learning the basics, you can never find solutions".

However, these people underestimate your brain. The brain is beautiful, and human intuition is capable of generating interest towards the things that are actually useful to reach your goal. When you feel like learning something related to your goal, by all means, give yourself the time to do so. But this still be much more efficient than just learning random things that other people tell you to learn.

Bibliography:

Many bad films have good aspects. They just didn't cross the elusive threshold of a good film.

Semi-comical student website to review the toilets of the University of São Paulo. Some of the toilets had a reputation for being terrible.

One is reminded of Crushbridge.

Affiliation: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Doctoral advisor: Murray Gell-Mann.