bPhone: iPhone theme for BlackBerry

For those of you with BlackBerry Bold model with awful lookalike icons, here is a good news. Now you can have iPhone theme/icons for BlackBerry. Kudos to Matthew Rogers for bringing us the wonderful theme. Please visit his website for more info.

Surviving the Russian Roulette...!!!

Back to my favourite game of beating the odds, here is another one....Russian roulette...!!!

Unfortunately you have been captured by the enemy and taken as prisoner of war. Your life now depends on a crazy army colonel who loves to play the game of Russian roulette with his prisoners. If you can survive his game you might get a chance to breathe for few more days. Here is the game...

You have been tied to a chair and won't be able to get up. The colonel brings in a barrel of the gun, six chambers, all empty. He will let you watch him put two bullets into adjacent chambers in the gun. Closes the barrel and spins it for few seconds. He fires one shot in the air, CLICK...the chamber was empty. Now he points it to your head and asks if you prefer to spin the barrel again before pulling the trigger or just pull the trigger without spinning. Which one would you prefer to increase your chances of surviving this deadly game? Remember the gun still has 2 bullets.

File format Bible

If you are a programmer working with different file formats, you would definitely find this site resourceful. I have been crawling the web sniffing math content where considerable portion of scientific material is in non-html/xml format. This site was handy when it came to parsing Microsoft word and powerpoint file format. In case you need a programmatic interface to Microsoft file formats, Jakarta has an answer with their POI project.

Great news...!!!

Me and my supervisor Robert Miner submitted a paper on math search engine titled "MathFind: A Math-Aware search engine" to ACM SIGIR 06. It was accepted to be published...!!! The paper talks about our current implementation of a prototype math search engine. We will be presenting it in the forthcoming ACM conference on August 9, 2006 in Seattle, USA.

How many lockers are open?

In a strange little town there is a school with 1000 students. Each student has a locker. The first student enters the locker room and opens all the lockers. The second closes all the even numbered lockers 2, 4, 6,...etc. The third student reverses the locker position (open locked doors and close opened doors) of locksers 3, 6, 9...etc. Similarly fourth student reverses the locker position of 4, 8, 12..etc. All the 1000 students follow the same procedure. The question is, after the 1000th student how many doors are still open?

What is wrong with this proof?

         Let x = y
     xx = xy
xx - yy = xy - yy
(x + y)(x - y) = y(x - y)
  x + y = y
  x + x = x
     2x = x
      2 = 1

Answer

Googol trivia

Ever wonder how Google got its name? It stemmed from the word GOOGOL. Googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros which was coined back in 1938, when it was the largest number. Currently googolplex is the largest number which is 1 followed by 1 googol zeros. Naming large numbers has existed right from Archimedes time. He used a unit called myriad myriad first number (1 followed by 8 zeros), myriad myriad second numbers (1 followed by 16 zeros) and so on to estimate the number of sand grains needed to fill in the known universe. His estimation was One thousand myriad myriad eighth numbers. However today we know that this much sand would fill in Milky Way Galaxybut not the entire universe.

• Googol is much larger than the number of particles in the known universe.
  
• The largest number that can be represented in a typical pocket calculator is 0.999999 googol.

Is it worth taking risk?

Me and my friend were on vacation in Las Vegas. We both have contradicting personalities. He is a risk taker while I am not. We were playing the Guessing Game in one of the casinos. The game is very simple. There are three boxes say A, B, C where only one of the boxes contains the prize. You need to play all three steps of the game before you claim the prize.

Step 1: You are supposed to guess the box containing the prize. Ofcourse all three boxes are equally probable. Say you chose box A.
Step 2: The game host will then open one of the other two boxes which does not have the prize. That is he wont open the box A as you have already chosen it in step 1. Hence, he will either open box B or C depending on which ever doesnt have the prize. Lets say he opened Box B.
Step 3: In this step, you can either claim the prize from the box A which you chose in first step or you can choose the other unopened box (Box C).

My friend claims, you will always increase your chances of winning if you choose a different box in step 3 rather than trusting your first instinct in step 1. But I argue it doesnt matter as both boxes have equal probability of containing the prize. Do you think taking the risk of switching the boxes increases your chances of winning?

NOTE: There are no tricks in the question. It is purely logical reasoning and the laws of probability.

[HINT: Try to think from the point of view of the game host rather than as a player.]