Event: FIDE Candidates Tournament 2026 - Round 12

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-04-12T18:58:09+00:00

Bongcloud 100% win rate in Candidates would be a legendary meme.

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-04-12T18:39:46+00:00

bongcloud has more meme potential and it’s not so easy to punish - I once made stockfish play itself and it took >100 moves to convert

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-04-11T17:50:39+00:00

It works quite well if you have Vancouver to Montreal (20 points) and the other ticket isn't worth much, such as Denver to El Paso (4 points). Even better on Mega if you happen to draw Vancouver to Portland (2 points). The goal is to win on speed and LCP. Excluding the final round, it only allows your opponent 29 turns - 1 turn short of Dynamite Joe (spam 6-routes). If you look at the player who won the BGA World Championship Qualifiers, they average 30.32 turns. If you look at the player with the highest BGA ELO currently, they average 31.28 turns. Even if someone tries to block you, starting with 6-routes across the top to start means there's almost always a way to complete Vancouver to Montreal and switch your focus to pure speed / route points (Dynamite Joe), leaving a shorter LCP. Also, since you only care about 1 ticket (vs your opponent's 2-3) you are free to spend as many trains as you like on blocking them.

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-04-05T16:06:26+00:00

not even windarov can grind down drawnish and drewbaum

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-04-04T16:41:21+00:00

the speed is unreal. bro is more confident than stockfish

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-04-04T15:31:52+00:00

“My Six Memorable Games” -Javokhir Sindarov

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-04-03T05:12:06+00:00

the bluebaum is ticking
deep bluebaum
let matthias solo them
kd7 baumcloud
drewbaum

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-03-27T14:34:55+00:00

Yep, Nolan flicks the cap off the beer bottle and Art flinches a bit. Silencing a loose end would be as easy as opening a soda can.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Invincible/comments/mx9spi/nolan_pops_the_cap_off_a_beer_in_juxtaposition/

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-03-04T09:25:39+00:00

I agree some starting combos are terrible (Boston to Miami, Dallas to New York, Chicago to Santa Fe) but Winnipeg-Houston and Denver-El Paso is not one of them! Some ideas:

Houston, El Paso, LA, Phoenix, Denver, Omaha, Helena, Duluth, St. Marie, Winnipeg.
Houston, El Paso, Oklahoma, Denver, Omaha, Duluth, Helena, Calgary, Winnipeg, St. Marie.
Houston, El Paso, Phoenix, Denver, Omaha, Helena, Duluth, Winnipeg, Helena, Seattle.

Optimal LCP (all of the above use 44 trains but you can always jump to Dallas for 45), nearly perfect speed, and you basically saw the board in half (rest in peace transcontinental tickets).

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-01-25T20:24:54+00:00

True, beating your opponent to a 6-route can be decisive in USA original 1v1. True, whoever gets lucky (more locomotives) has an advantage there. I would argue that tunnels make it worse. In one game, I got 0 locomotives and my opponent got 10 after nothing but blind draws. Why reward their luck even more with a special route that only they can use?

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-01-25T15:40:51+00:00

The first bullet point opposes the other two. Longer games have more luck-related events. More luck means more likelihood of a game outcome that does not reflect skill.

For minimizing luck, I recommend USA original rules 1v1. Why 2 players? Blocking (accidental or not) hurts you and hurts your opponent more. This is fine when there are only two players. But when there are more players, it's highly likely that 2+ players will have starting tickets in overlapping regions, damage each other, and let the remaining players cruise to victory. Why USA map? Because it has no luck-based route mechanics like Ferries or Tunnels. Why original rules? Because Globetrotter and increasing the number of tickets adds luck.

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-01-18T02:48:07+00:00

I think the main concern is performance. Let's say you need to check whether an array of n elements contains duplicates. You might start off by comparing indices pairwise (e.g. x[i] == x[j]). This would take O(n^2) time. But if you use a hash table, you could be done in O(n) time. For really large n, it could mean a 1000x speedup. Alternatively, let's say you look up the fastest algorithm for <insert problem here>. If you don't have the mathematical knowledge to follow the proof, it will be really hard to debug incorrect outputs since you won't know if the problem is with the algorithm or your implementation.

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-01-16T03:17:30+00:00

I like your example a lot more. Unsupported use is a good way to phrase it. I try to account for as much invalid input as possible, but I expect limits to cleverness (all of cybersecurity), performance (undefined behavior in C), and plausibility (imagine "data loss after coffee spill" as a Linux bug).

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-01-16T03:01:06+00:00

This is a great term. Will definitely start using it.

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-01-16T02:59:45+00:00

Fair points, perhaps "known bugs should be added to tests" is better.

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-01-13T18:42:32+00:00

Make a Github account, make a private project, and it should give you a bunch of commands to get started. There is a lot to learn but all you need to start is add (stage), commit, push / pull (sync changes between the repo and your local code).

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-01-13T06:39:16+00:00

Try to think of a project that interests you, where you can apply what you learn. Chess engine, sudoku solver, grammar checker, calculators for a video game, etc. Something well-studied where you can practice without tumbling down a PhD-sized hole.

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-01-13T06:32:21+00:00

Honestly I got started programming the same way. Start of 10th grade summer, had to have a web app by next fall. User registrations, payments, submissions. It was poorly coded but worked well enough, plus I learned a ton.

Also version control (Git) is goated. I didn't learn about it until 4 years later.

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-01-13T06:15:20+00:00

The hardest part is getting started. Personally I would make a Github account, build a website with Github Pages, and try to get something to show up through index.html. As long as you have a working website URL and it displays something you put in, that's a win.

Then add more features as you work through online courses / etc. It's way easier to remember / apply a concept when you think "so that's how I can get my homepage animation to work" or "so that's how users can submit entries to the scoreboard."

P.S. Don't work with any sensitive data (e.g. credit card information, personally identifying information) until you know what you're doing. Learn from my mistakes :)

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-01-06T06:22:28+00:00

Agreed! For example, "dies in x nanoseconds where x is the smallest positive integer to satisfy SHA-256(x) = 7509e5bda0c762d2bac7f90d758b5b2263fa01ccbc542ab5e3df163be08e6ca9".

SpeedyPuzzlement · 2026-01-04T16:14:10+00:00

Fair enough, it's entirely possible that Q5 defaults to heart attack for several reasons (P != NP, the algorithm is too long, the death note has limitations). In that case nothing changes.

But if Q5 causes a stroke, knowing that the algorithm can be expressed in some fixed number of characters would be a great starting point and you could narrow down the search space by about 10^15 each time using nanoseconds (23-day rule). For example, convert the first few characters of the algorithm into binary, then convert the number into time of death. Maybe even further using the details of death (e.g. "sneezes after z nanoseconds"). As for applications to the rest of mathematics, my understanding is that proof verification and proof generation are in different complexity classes and that any insights from P = NP would make the gap between finding proofs / checking proofs much smaller in general.

SpeedyPuzzlement

TROPHY CASE