Ricochet Robot bragging

Woo hoo, I got second place (out of 325 players) yesterday on RicochetRobot.com! It was somewhat a matter of luck that I just happened to see the optimal solution quickly, but practice has definitely made me much better.

In related news, I played the new "Ricochet Robots" (with an "s") version of the board game tonight, and my conclusion is that the diagonal walls are kind of lame. Ah well.

Efficiency defined

The other day I got mail from Match.com out of the blue for the first time in a long time. I've had an account there pretty much since it started, because back then they were giving out charter memberships for free (I'm nowhere near the point of wanting to pay money for a personals ad). I've never met anyone through it, but I've had a handful of email conversations with people who responded to my profile; nothing in the last three years or so, though, and I had all but forgotten about it until they sent me a new list of matches for no apparent reason. So I went to the site to do some idle browsing, and when I went to update my profile, I noticed that I had set the headline to:

Efficiency is intelligent laziness. --David Dunham

I have absolutely no memory of using this quote; I don't even know where I found it, though I'm guessing I stole it from someone's .sig file. It's a fine slogan, though, and resonates with me (being intelligent, lazy, and somewhat overly obsessed with efficiency on several different levels) so I guess I should give kudos to the me of the past. (I'm not so sure it's the best line for picking up chicks, but probably the idea was that I'd like the kind of chicks it would pick up.) Anyway, I'm glad I recovered this aphorism from the pile of forgotten trivia, and I'm recording it here for a somewhat more public posterity.