Why AV is bad (for the BNP)
I don’t think that the benefit to one party or another is a valid reason to pick a voting system – but one of the features of AV is that it tends to select the least objectionable candidate. Here’s a...
View ArticleThose medalling kids: knockout tournaments and who wins what?
(This piece is based on a paper I read recently… but I can’t find a reference for it. If you know which paper I mean, please let me know and I’ll update.) There’s a reason tennis knockout draws are...
View ArticleSorting a list on the fly
I was writing a sort of revision sheet the other day, and I’d written the questions in a sensible order, but wanted to shuffle them randomly so that students wouldn’t know what’s coming next. This is...
View ArticleScheduling a Scrabble tournament
Once upon a time, there was a Scrabble tournament. Sixteen of the county’s greatest Scrabbleologists descended on the venue… only to find the organiser had lost the fixture list. What the organise...
View ArticleA student asks… about the Simplex Algorithm
th,td {padding:5px;text-align:center;} A student asks: I’m struggling with the simplex algorithm. How do I read the tableau at the end? And how do I pick the right pivot? The simplex algorithm – which...
View ArticlePrim vs Kruskal
A student asks: How do you remember the difference between Prim’s algorithm and Kruskal’s algorithm? In honesty, I don’t. This is one of the things that REALLY FRUSTRATES me about D1: it puts so much...
View Article
