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Recent Posts

A collection of personal posts and short coding demonstrations.

Author

Benjamin Soltoff

Can You Defeat the Detroit Lines?

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riddler
This week’s Riddler Express features a challenge drawn from the world of football analytics:
Jan 8, 2022
4 min

More Menorah Math!

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riddler
This week’s Riddler Express deals with some menorah math that provides a good application for combinatorics:
Dec 15, 2021
4 min

Time travel for the lottery

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riddler
Today’s Riddler Express features an interesting optimization problem:
Oct 10, 2021
4 min

Can you bake the radish pie?

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riddler
Today’s Riddler Express was an interesting application of sequences and convergence:1
Sep 17, 2021
5 min

How low would a batter’s chances of reaching base have to be for you to expect one perfect game per season?

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riddler
The recent Riddler Express deals with the increasing rate of no-hitters in the MLB:
Jun 2, 2021
5 min

Can You Find The Fish In State Names?

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riddler

The recent Riddler classic offered this intriguing challenge: Ohio is the only state whose name doesnt share any letters with the word “mackerel.” Its strange, but its true.

May 22, 2020
8 min

Can You Find The Best Dungeons & Dragons Strategy?

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riddler

I enjoyed the recent Riddler challenger from May 15th: The fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons introduced a system of “advantage and disadvantage.” When you roll a die “with advantage,” you roll the die twice and keep the higher result.

May 15, 2020
5 min

How Good Are You At Guess Who?

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riddler
The most recent Riddler Express gave me an opportunity to refresh some base R notation, as well as combine it with a technique I learned while reading Hadley Wickham’s Advanc…
Mar 8, 2020
5 min

How Many More Palindrome Dates Will You See?

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riddler
I’m currently on paternity leave and in search of quick but interesting programming challenges to stay fresh. The latest Riddler Express provided a quick refresher on string…
Feb 8, 2020
2 min

Winning the World Chess Championship

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riddler
This week’s Riddler Express from FiveThirtyEight:
Nov 16, 2018
4 min

Cubs World Series Puzzles (For Fun)

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riddler

This week’s Riddler Express from FiveThirtyEight: The best team in baseball this year, the Chicago Cubs, have clinched their playoff spot and will play their first playoff game a week from today.

Oct 6, 2016
2 min

A Modified Draft Pick Selection Order

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riddler
In preparation for teaching a new computing course for the social sciences, I’ve been practicing building interactive websites using Shiny for R. The latest Riddler puzzle…
Sep 20, 2016
3 min

Can You Best The Mysterious Man In The Trench Coat?

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riddler

The latest Riddler puzzle on FiveThirtyEight: A man in a trench coat approaches you and pulls an envelope from his pocket. He tells you that it contains a sum of money in bills, anywhere from $1 up to $1,000.

Mar 20, 2016
14 min

Can You Win This Hot New Game Show?

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riddler

So the latest Riddler puzzle on FiveThirtyEight goes like this: Two players go on a hot new game show called “Higher Number Wins.” The two go into separate booths, and each presses a button, and a random number between zero and one appears…

Mar 9, 2016
8 min

Will Someone Be Sitting In Your Seat On The Plane?

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riddler

This week’s Riddler puzzle on FiveThirtyEight features the following questions: There’s an airplane with 100 seats, and there are 100 ticketed passengers each with an assigned seat. They line up to board in some random order.

Feb 21, 2016
4 min

Do Cops Pull Over Fewer People in the Rain?

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An Assessment of Precipitation’s Effect on Traffic Stops

Feb 1, 2016
5 min

Valuing Timeouts in Football (Part II)

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football

Last week I examined how one can use logistic regression to estimate the value of a timeout, with minimal success.

Jan 18, 2016
15 min

Valuing Timeouts in Football

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football

On December 27, the Pittsburgh Steelers were down 13-3 against their rivals, the Baltimore Ravens, after the first half. The Ravens opened the second half with the ball, but quickly punted the ball following a three-and-out drive.

Jan 13, 2016
10 min

The Forrest Bounce and Its Effect on Triple Stumpers

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jeopardy

An analysis of Jeopardy! game play.

Mar 13, 2014
6 min
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