Mgccl's blog

Nice. I thought I applied for regular action, but I did early action for both Stony Brook and Binghamton(which I missed the EA deadline. oh well, who cares, I'm in SBU bitch~).
So I'm going to SBU, unless CMU admits me.
It would be a problem, as CMU cost way more than SBU.
I hope CMU doesn't admit me so I don't have to make the choice.

I'm FREE of college application once for all~
Now it's all about financial aids...

The $450 I got from the iTest video contest seems to be lost as my dad throw away all the unimportant-looking letters while I was in China.

In Facebook, and in Xiaonei. People sometimes do a survey game(Chinese is a popular点名游戏) something like this

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with answering the following 10 questions. Change one of those question into a question you want to ask, and tag 10 other people, so they will do a survey with your question.

1. Who is your favorite person
....

Why 10? why only change 1 question, why tag 10 other people? Can these number be something else that's BETTER?

First we have to think of a criteria for a good game
1. The person who just answered a survey, might get tagged by someone else, and it would suck if most question are the same.
2. Each person wants to maximize the amount of people answer his own questions.
Suppose the probability of not having to do the same question is P, and the expected amount of people to answer someone's question is R.
The larger the RP the better.

Suppose there are n survey questions each survey. Each time one answer the survey can remove m problems and add m of their own. The removal of problem is completely random. and no one will ever propose the same problem as someone else. Then each person have to name k people randomly from their friends to do their survey.
Now, if there are y people, each have f friends(a is b's friend means b is a's friend). What n,k,m will maximize RP?

This helps to form a more scientific survey game.

We can add further restrictions later.

It sucks as for a y, some f is not possible.
Hell. I'm still stuck in the first part.
How many distinct graphs can have y vertexes and f edges each. and what is probability to come up with a specific graph?

Fun. going to think more about it.
and I lied about not posting before leave China.

I'm not going to Suffolk County Math Tournament.
I go to China so I could increase my skill to be top of Suffolk. But I never get to show it. Irony.
I'm not going to Princeton Math Competition.
Thx to myself abandon my school to join another school's team which ultimately filled up by other people. Irony.
So AMC become the first contest I do this year, not a good sign.

I always having moments as "Humm, who is this guy?" while checking a person's IM profile.
I have move between many computers and reinstall windows all the time, my chat log never have enough volume before it is all cleared.
So, I wish to create a database storing all my chat logs from all sources.
Search-able, and can be put online so I could check anytime.

For most IM system, this is easy.
QQ, the IM system I hate most(but I must use), it is not.
First, the time of each message are recorded against each user's window's time.
Ha. so something like this could happen.

19:02:04 2008/12/23 Mgccl
What do you call a life philosophy only cares about having fun in this world.
13:02:04 2007/11/02 PUNishment
What?
19:02:14 2008/12/23 Mgccl
phiLOLsophy.
13:02:30 2007/11/02 PUNishment
Sounds like a pun only you can come up with.

Uhh, do they know HOW much pain this will generate? I have to create a separate index other than time to store the order of the chat. Also, what do I do if I want to see all chat taken place at 2007? Time become useless because we don't know which time is correct.

I have always loath Tencent, the company made QQ. They
1. Do not care about accessibility or web standard in their products, for example, Qzone. Here is my Qzone, when you look at it, do you just want to strangle the developer? because this is in fact the cleanest possible page ANY user can get. I personally removed all the most evil stuff ever for web page--A auto playing music player. Also, I hate those flying flower petals used to fuck up user experience(This is not fucking Bleach and your Qzone is not where Byakuya uses his bankai. Get over it).
2. Every product of Tencent are 99% shit + 1% crap.
For example QQ. Look at those QQshow, where people pay money to buy customized clothes for other QQ user to see...actually, force other QQ users to watch and raping their eyes...
or QQ pet and 100 other extremely superfluous functions that comes with QQ.
Can QQ be skinless, I just need a simple clean look.
Can it just do what I really want? I just need to "send/receive pure UTF encoded messages to/from another person who holds an account"
I can find poorly optimized 3D games made in Java using less resource than QQ.

3. QQ's message Protocol is not open. Obviously it's reasonable. I mean if anyone can use the protocol, even a naive VB.NET user can clearly make something WAY MORE superior and efficient than QQ. How inconvenient(Global warming isn't caused by human). QQ doesn't support Linux at all. All the implementation of QQ protocol are doomed very soon as QQ just love to change it's protocol to screw up open source developers.

4. Really? as I mentioned before. record send time of the chat user with each user's local time instead of server time? Do they hire 13 year old first time programmers?

Now. On to something else.
While I was taking with a friend I have long time ago. I found I like to categorize people I like into physical or non-physical attraction, but never both. Obviously it is possible it is both because those quality are not mutually exclusive, but I will still stuff it in one categorize and completely ignore the other part. A great discovery of myself. It seems if I'm attracted to both, then it's possible for me to act not as rational as I use to be as I have would have desire to take relationship to a higher level. Interesting.

FeelingFly recently found a close friend in his childhood and blogged about it. It's a VERY hot girl who is working towards a master degree mathematical economics.
Which lead to my use of Xiaonei, a clone of Facebook used by Chinese people. (I really wish everyone just use facebook so everyone can connect to each other... but anyway) I found some classmate I have in elementary and middle school, no one become hot and working in area even close to mathematics(management, architecture and environmental engineering) . Irony again.

I gone though my old books, and realized I have done some Olympiad math at 4th grade(I already forgot all about it...). I read the 4th grade textbook on Olympiad math, all problems are very easy but there are variation of Joseph's problem used as a example, also some stuff about Eulerian path in a undirected graph. Now I see why China is kicking ass at IMO.

Going to be back in US really soon. Woot.
A picture of common quail eggs and a chicken egg.

What happened to them? I ate them.

Ai lijima was found died yesterday.
The reason I heard about her was her semi-autobiographical novel, Platonic sex.
The title strike me as a oxymoron. Clearly it is referring to Platonic love, but also sex, which makes a platonic love not platonic.

One has to see the movie(since the novel is in Japanese...) to understand why it is heart breaking.

Most Chinese people only known Ai lijima as a AV idol, completely ignoring the fact she left the field and turned into mainstream entertainment a long time ago. Since the media(at least the Chinese one) know this fact, they starting rumors about the reason she dies. Guess it's because many people cares about information like this.

Remind me of a independent film 你丫真狠 I saw yesterday. The media keep uncovering stuff that most people just curious about. When there should be no reason to curious about such trivial things. In the end, everyone's life was screwed. I lol. Irony is so fun.

BTW Merry Christmas!~
I still don't know when should I say Merry Christmas, on Christmas eve or on Christmas day?

There is a game called Numbrosia. The game is a 5*5 board with each block have a integer value. There are few operations, add 1 to every single block in a row or column. Shift every block in a row left or right. Shift every block in a column up or down. One want to minimize the amount of operation to get all blocks to 0.
We only consider Numbrosia with positive numbers. (if there are negative integers, just add the same amount of number on each row until all numbers are positive)

Now, create a generalized Numbrosia. Where it is n*n board instead of 5*5.
First question. Is all configuration solvable.
Answer. No. When the sum of all numbers is not divisible by n. It is not solvable.
If, the sum is divisible by n, is it solvable. Yeah. There is a simple yet inefficient algorithm to make sure you go solve it. Taking way more than the amount of optimal steps.
(a,b) = the position, = value at that position.
First, let's suppose it's we have a positive integers in each block. Find the lowest positive number, reduce it with the same row until it's 0. Do the same thing to other numbers, except if there is 0 on the same row, move it away until all numbers on the same row are positive. Do it until there is only one row left. Just to make everything easier, suppose that row is to and when i<=j. It's ok to assume since it's possible to alter the blocks into any arrangement if it's not in our desired formation.

Now, there is a simple algorithm to solve the game in this condition.
1. Do addition on row 2 so all number on row 2 = 1.
2. Move 1s from row 2 to 0s in row 1. If there is not enough 1s left, after all 1s are moved to row 1, go to step 1.
3. subtract row 1 again. Now there are 0s in row 1. If there is only 0s in row 1, end.
4. go to step 2.

So clearly, it is possible to solve a n*n Numbrosia when the sum of the numbers is divisible by n.

I assume the minimal number of step to solve it is 2an, where a is the largest number in the game.