Is it better to get $100 today or $110 in one years time? The answer’s not straightforward because you could use $100 today to potentially earn more than $10 over 12 months. How do you know what to do? For that, you need to know how to calculate a rate of return or use it […]

In this installment, we continue looking at Conway’s Game of Life and our exploration of cellular automata. Now that we can calculate how one cell in our grid changes from one generation to the next, we can extend that to see how an arbitrarily sized grid changes from one cell to the next.

In this installment, we continue looking at Conway’s Game of Life and our exploration of cellular automata. Now that we can calculate how one cell in our grid changes from one generation to the next, we can extend that to see how an arbitrarily sized grid changes from one cell to the next.

Encrypting and decrypting messages were an early computing application. Last month’s challenge was to implement and harden a cipher from antiquity. Let’s look at possible solutions before moving on to this month’s challenge.

Encrypting and decrypting messages were an early computing application. Last month’s challenge was to implement and harden a cipher from antiquity. Let’s look at possible solutions before moving on to this month’s challenge.

Ciphers come in many different forms and have been used since ancient times to encode and decode vital messages. Today, we use complicated mathematics to encrypt and decrypt messages. Typically, we depend on shared and secret keys to ensure the message is only readable by the intended recipients. What if you don’t have the computing […]

This month, we have a try at writing a function to play the hand gesture game Rock Paper Scissors. It serves as an example of a single function that takes in a distinct set of inputs to return an output based on pre-defined rules.

This month, we move on from our grid and maze-based puzzles to another stand-alone puzzle parsing strings. We’ll take a string of text containing whitespace-separated words and turn them into hashtags for social media posts.

In years past, scientists had to draw conclusions from whatever small data they could procure themselves. Advancements in data collection, storage, and analysis have revolutionized the data sets now available to scientists—and also you and me.

This month, we wrap up our grid maze theme by adding some noise or empty space to our grid that already contains a path from the entrance to the exit. The idea is to approximate an environment map for a tabletop game.