Miss King - Netflix Series

『MISS KING / ミス・キング』本予告｜9月29日(月)よる8時ABEMAで無料配信
ABEMA ドラマ【公式】
Miss King is basically a Japanese version of Queen's Gambit. We've got a disadvantaged young woman taking up the game of Soghi to exact revenge on her estranged father, the current champion.

Our girl's father named her for the rook piece from the game - Asuku. Her father inexplicably abandons her and her mother, her mother contracts cancer and dies, our girl gets framed for stealing at her job and evicted from her apartment. Freeloader and former Soghi contender Seigio drags her into his local hangout where the landlord gives her a place to stay.

Seigio and Asuku find they have something in common - hatred for Asuku's father - so they embark on a course of revenge. Seems Asuku, at the age of six, was a bit of a prodigy, which might be why her father left. So Asuku resumes playing the game and starts competing, working her way up through the ranks of competing players until she can finally challenge her father.

I really enjoyed Queen's Gambit and Miss King. I have no particular interest in chess, but these stories about the players are pretty great. We have watched several Japanese shows this year and while they were passable, this is the first one that was actually very good.

I have played chess, but it seemed like a lot work for not much reward, other than the thrill of victory, which won't buy you a stick of gum, much less a cup of coffee, unless you get to the top of the heap, and how likely is that?

I always thought Chess was international, and I suppose it is, but there are variations out there and Soghi is one of those. It's a little more complicated with the ability to add captured enemy pieces to your own forces.

8 short episodes

Booker Bukhman Prize

Dmitri and Daria Bukhman

Meduza reports:

The Booker Prize Foundation announced that the International Booker Prize is being renamed the Bukhman International Booker Prize, in recognition of Bukhman Philanthropies, the charitable foundation of Russian-born billionaire Dmitri Bukhman and his wife, Daria.

The family name was added to the prize’s title after the Bukhmans’ charity committed to funding the award for the next decade and doubled the winner’s purse, from £50,000 to £100,000.

The International Booker Prize is awarded for a work of fiction originally written in another language, translated into English, and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland.

Bukhman’s net worth is estimated at $13.6 billion. With his brother Igor, he co-founded the mobile-game developer Playrix. The brothers started the company in Vologda, Russia, but Playrix has long been headquartered in Ireland. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, the company shut down its Russian operations.

Secret Agent Miss Fortune

Secret Agent Miss Fortune

Miss Fortune is a character from the video game League of Legends. Never played it.

Gamescom 2025

Stolen entire from Eunoia:

Held in Cologne, the world's largest computer game show had even more visitors this year. Like 357,000 so see photo below of the crowds. That`s 22,000 more than last year. There were 1568 companies showing their wares (including resellers) I'm told, so I didn`t get to see all of the games, let alone play any. 

On the downside, statistics show that on average teenagers are spending each weekday 142 minutes indoors playing computer games, rising to 171 minutes daily at weekends. Time that might be better spent playing (sports?) outside instead of sitting hunchbacked indoors. Are games too addictive?

Tickets were 30 € on sunday, which I found overpriced. No pensioner rebates, in fact I might have been the only over-30 there ;-) It was mostly teens and twens.

I am sure that there are some amazing computer games, but I only play stupid, free solitaire games on the net. I suspect it's because I am cheap (and some of these games are downright expensive), and I don't have the patience to learn a bunch of arcane rules. Same reason I haven't mastered any computer aided design programs. I spent years learning arcane rules for building and programming computers and now my brain is full.

I try to keep my game playing down to maybe an hour a day, it is calming. My worst fault is watching YouTube short videos. I might spend an hour a day doing that. This blog, my family and my house consume most of my time.

Pinball!

Next Level Pinball

Next Level Pinball Museum is not far from my house. I think I stopped by there once about a zillion years ago. I never picked up the pinball habit, possibly because my coordination is weak, but mostly because I wasn't willing to keep feeding quarters to the machine.

The place is pretty amazing with over 650 pinball machines and arcade games and most of those are free to play. The Oregonian has a bunch of pictures.

Werewolf

Mind-Blowing Game Invented by Russian Sociology Student
Triggernometry

Wikipedia article about the game.

Connections

Connections - New York Times Game

New game in town. Like Wordle, there is a new puzzle every day. Some of them are easy, some are difficult and some are impossible. Often, a category is determined by similarities between the objects the words demarcate (there's got to be a less pretentious way to phrase that). Sometimes they aren't, sometimes it's the kind of word or how it's spelled or, I dunno, how they were used in a movie. Some of these categories are way out there. What makes it tricky is some words can fall into more than one category and only by judicious juggling can you find four groups of four.

P. S. I play their games, but I don't read their stories, not since they caught lying a couple of times. I imagine most of their stuff is probably pretty accurate, albeit slanted, but their sterling reputation has been tarnished so they are not be trusted.

Fianchetto

Fianchetto - Black Bishop has moved up one row

Fianchetto is this week's most annoying word. I came across it in The Queen's Gambit but I failed to take note of the page number and Google Books won't tell me, so if you care you'll have to dig it out yourself. 

Fianchetto is an Italian word, it is the diminutive of fianco (“flank”). It just means that a bishop has advanced to the second row, which implies it now has a much wider range of attack. In the board position shown above, the fianchettoed black bishop now has the white knight in range. Taking the knight would also put the white king (the piece with the cross on top) in check. However, if black takes the knight it would subject to being taken by the pawn on B2.

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis

A Soviet Chess Championship

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis was a lightweight, entertaining read. I saw the movie a while back and it was great. I played chess a few times when I was younger, but I never developed much enthusiasm for it. After all, it's just a game and one plays games for fun. Chess takes a lot of mental energy and it just seemed to me that that energy could be put to use doing something more productive. Yes, Beth Harmon makes a bundle of money playing chess, but she's the only one. Everyone else goes home broke. Some people develop obsessions and sometimes those obsessions produce amazing results, but I suspect most obsessions only serve to keep people's mind's occupied and produce nothing exceptional.

Soviet Kirovets K-700 Tractor

Page 214 "she saw three enormous tractors, far bigger than anything she had seen in America". They might have been Kirovets tractors. They were certainly big, and the time frame is right. Tractors this size are common now in the USA, but I don't think there were any like this here sixty years ago.

Words I was familiar with, but didn't know the exact meaning of.

• Page 198 "Hani soit qui mal y pense" - French for "shame on anyone who thinks wrong"
• Page 212 antimacassar - a piece of cloth put over the back of a chair to protect it from grease and dirt or as an ornament.
• Page 240 eidetic - relating to or denoting mental images having unusual vividness and detail, as if actually visible.

Jadium

Jadium

I came across a different version of Numbrix called Jadium. Well, not really, I stumbled on a page with a single static example (above). Numbrix is a fairly simple game, you just need to fill in all the 9 x 9 square with the numbers from 1 to 81 in sequence. It shows up in the Sunday newspaper supplement Parade, if you still get the Sunday paper. It's usually pretty easy, but change up the starting configuration just a bit and it can quickly become more difficult. Jadium is supposed to be more difficult and given that it has only a few numbers posted to start, I can see that it could be. But no on-line version, and just this one image, so I'm wondering if it is even possible to solve it.

How-some-ever, I wrote a program a while back to solve Numbrix puzzles and since this one conforms to the same rules as Numbrix, it should be able to solve it. So I tried it out.

Just for a baseline, I tried it with a completely empty field.

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

|  1 |  2 |  3 |  4 |  5 |  6 |  7 |  8 |  9 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

| 18 | 17 | 16 | 15 | 14 | 13 | 12 | 11 | 10 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

| 36 | 35 | 34 | 33 | 32 | 31 | 30 | 29 | 28 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

| 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

| 54 | 53 | 52 | 51 | 50 | 49 | 48 | 47 | 46 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

| 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

| 72 | 71 | 70 | 69 | 68 | 67 | 66 | 65 | 64 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

| 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 | 80 | 81 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

Number of calls to tracking procedure: 190

No problem, filled in the field very quickly. Next I tried it with the Jadium example.

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

| 57 | 56 | 55 | 54 | 53 | 52 | 51 | 50 | 49 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

| 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 64 | 65 | 46 | 47 | 48 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

|  3 |  2 |  1 | 62 | 63 | 66 | 45 | 44 | 43 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

|  4 | 73 | 72 | 71 | 70 | 67 | 24 | 25 | 42 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

|  5 | 74 | 77 | 78 | 69 | 68 | 23 | 26 | 41 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

|  6 | 75 | 76 | 79 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 27 | 40 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

|  7 |  8 |  9 | 80 | 19 | 32 | 31 | 28 | 39 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

| 12 | 11 | 10 | 81 | 18 | 33 | 30 | 29 | 38 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 |

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

Number of calls to tracking procedure: 323,522,476

This one took a while, several seconds in fact, long enough to make me wonder if it had gotten hung up. But no, it just took a while.

Source code can be found here.

Publicity

I usually play 0hh1 three or four times a day. It's fairly mindless, takes about three minutes to play. During the last few days I've getting an announcement at the end of each game asking me to "share" it, as it will help them "grow". Struck me as a little curious because there are no ads on the page, not when you start, not when you are playing, none. So how would sharing it help them grow? If enough people play it, their server / hosting costs might rise above negligible, in which case they might be able to take it to an adverstising agency, like Google, and sign up to have ads on their site.

Or maybe they're just doing for the glory, and if the costs rise, well, that's a worthwhile price to pay for fame.

🟦🟥 I played 3000 games of 0h h1 💪

🟥🟦 It's fun, free and has no ads.

3,000 games at 3 minutes each would be 9,000 minutes which 150 hours spread over, what? five years? No, at least seven years.

I'm so bad, I'm so glad

Netwalk Perfect Solution

I play Netwalk several times a day. I can usually solve it in under two minutes and it usually takes me about one and one half times the target number of moves to solve it. But every once in blue moon I stumble into a perfect play. Today was one of those days.

In other news, I poured out exactly 14 potassium tablets, all in a bunch, without counting, and I did it twice, once for my morning dose and once for my evening dose.

cream - i'm so glad
odeliara
Skip James recorded I'm So Glad back in 1931. The recording on YouTube is pretty poor. Cream's version is the one I'm familiar with. It came out 1968 when I was still in high school.

Wordle

I play Wordle most every day, it's just my speed. Some days the answer appears as if by magic, other days I am wrought with anguish. Today's puzzle was super-annoying. On my second guess I got three of the letters in the right place. Do you know how many words there are with the letters placed like this:

_ O _ E R (highlight to read)

I thought of nine right off the bat, and I've only got four places left to use. Well, what I need is a word made entirely of letters that haven't been used yet, but that doesn't help much. I've still got 16 letters to choose from, I may as well be starting blind. If I am lucky, sticking in some random word would help, but would it be enough help to be worth one of the four places I have left? I decided it wasn't and instead tried to eliminate as many words as I could from my list. Two words had a B and two words had an N, so with two guesses I was able to eliminate four words from my list. It wasn't enough. The answer was the name of a fictional TV persona. 

(H O M E R) (highlight to read) 

It was on my list, but I had discounted just because of the name association. Too late I realized it also referred to a baseball play, and it's spring, and all right thinking people's thoughts turn to baseball. If you're not thinking about baseball, that makes you some kind of commie. Wasn't that the standard test of suspicious persons during WW2 and the Cold War? Guess I flubbed that test.

Quordle

Quordle Solution

Wordle is a new word puzzle that has been sweeping the internet. It's great, most everyone in my family plays it every day. It's just the right amount of difficult, but the best part is that there is only one puzzle each day, so you can't spend all day playing one puzzle after another.

Now we've got Quordle, a knock off of Wordle that gives you four words to decipher. At first glance it might look more difficult, but if you just work on one word at a time, by the time you have solved that one you have several clues to help you with the second one, and so on.

What are the odds?

1964 Lotus 34*
160 piece jigsaw puzzle

Working on jigsaw puzzles is one of my favorite pass times these days. My standard procedure is pick out all of the edge pieces and work inward from there. The funny thing is that I often get a pair of tiles that connect even though I have only sorted through a few of the pieces, so now I'm wondering what are the odds? Say you have a 10 by 12 puzzle. You're going to have 120 pieces all told and 40 of those pieces will be edge pieces. If you have picked out n edge pieces, what are the odds that the next edge piece you pull will be a match for any of your existing pieces?

Starting with the edge and working inward works with most puzzles, but it didn't work for the one shown above. Puzzle pieces come in a variety of shapes, usually with curving edges that interlock with each other. Not this one, here the pieces are simple quadrilaterals and some pieces that were not edge pieces also had sides that were either perfectly vertical or horizontal, so you couldn't tell if they were edge pieces or not. The fact that half of the pieces were pure black didn't help either. So for this puzzle, I started from the center where there was something to see and worked outward.

When we are playing Rummikub, at the start you are usually holding at least one group of three tiles (either a run or three of a kind). The longer you play, the more tiles are on the board, and so there are more opportunities to play. How many tiles need to be on the board for you to be able to play all the tiles you are holding? Another way to put it, is how many tiles do you need to play them all? If you have three tiles, and they are all the same number, then three is all you need. But what are the odds of having three of a kind? Likewise, if you have 30 tiles, what are the odds that you could combine all of them into runs or three or four of a kind? I am not sure there is a mathematical formula for it. It might take a simulation, which is right up my alley.

* The Lotus 34 was a British racing car built by Team Lotus for the 1964 Indianapolis 500. . . . At Indianapolis, Jim Clark qualified on the pole, joined by five other similar cars. The Dunlop tyres failed during the race, leading to Clark crashing and the second 34 being parked. - Wikipedia

Rummikub

Rummikub Opening Hand

We play a couple hands most afternoons just before dinner. This one was my opening hand last night. I was moderately surprised.

Puzzle Pic of the Day

Cleaning Big Ben
110 Pieces

Don't think I've seen a picture of Big Ben with such detail before. The Roman Numerals are almost unreadable. They are arranged with the bottom of the letters pointing to the center and the top facing the outer rim, so while the letters at the 6 o'clock position might look like i n, it is actually VI upside down. The X doesn't look much like any X I've ever seen.

Rummikub

Rummikub

We play two or three hands of Rummikub most evenings these days. Sometimes just the wife and I, sometimes with the kids. It's a fairly simple minded game, much like gin or rummy or gin rummy (if you tell the difference between them you're a better man than I). The trick is that after someone has played some tiles, you can rearrange them into new combinations as long as when you are done all the combinations on the board are valid.

When the game starts it goes pretty quickly, people are just drawing one tile after another. Eventually people start laying down tiles and when you reach a critical mass of played tiles is when it gets interesting. People have fewer tiles in their hands and are looking to go out. Rearranging may involve multiple steps, taking tiles from one sequence, building new sequences and using the left over tiles to build another sequence. There might be dozen of these steps involved in a single play. Osmany is a master of it. Anyway, when we are in this stage of the game, when a player's turn comes, they may sit staring at the board for a long time, long enough for you to fall asleep, take a nap, catch a ball game, go to the beach. I exaggerate, but it might be several minutes. It doesn't really help to plan ahead because a single tile played can alter the entire situation.

It keeps us amused.

P.S. Rummikub showed up in an episode of Behzat Ç.

Down Time

0h h1

When I am done trying to get things done, or I just need a break, I'll fire up YouTube, unleash it on My Mix, and open a game of solitaire on a new tab. I have three games I play regularly, sometimes a fourth if the situation warrants. I play these games in order. It usually eats up about 30 minutes. It may go to an hour. First I'll play Netwalk at the Expert level. It takes about a minute. I don't have a strategy that I know of, I just start rotating pieces until everything is connected. It usually takes me about twice as many steps as the posted goal value. On occasion I have solved it in the same number of steps as the goal. If I am feeling fuzzy headed, it might take me four or five times as many steps as the goal.

Next I'll move on to 0h h1 (shown above).  It usually takes about three or four minutes. There are like three levels of play here. The object of the game is to fill in all of the squares, but you may not have more than two blocks of the same color next to each other. The first level is to fill in the obvious places. In places where you have two pieces of the same color next to each other, you know that on either end you must have pieces of the opposite color. Any place where you have two pieces of the same color separated by an empty space, that space needs to filled with a piece of the opposite color. Now if you are lucky, you may have some rows (or columns) that are almost entirely filled. Each row and column needs to be half of one color and half of the other. A count of the current pieces may reveal the color required in the the remaining places.

Now we need to think a bit. Look at a row and where all the current pieces are placed. Mentally try placing pieces in that row (or columns). It may be that there is pair of spaces that require one piece of each color, but then one space is left over, and a count of place pieces should reveal the color required for that last place. You may have several places like that, or you might have a situation where you need to place blue pieces in several places, but you end up with one extra spot, so that spot must be red.

Every once in a while, these basic techniques will be enough to solve the puzzle. More often, you will end up with several pairs of spaces that each require one piece of each color and the only way to determine which one is which is to compare the lines with the other completed lines in the puzzle and find one that matches all of the pieces placed so far. Then the solution is to reverse the colors of the two pieces that correspond to the empty slots. This is most annoying part of the game, and depending on my attitude I may not attempt it, but just use the game's 'eyeball' to identify the matching line. In those cases I count it a 'win' if I haven't overlooked any thing that I should have found using the basic techniques.

The third game is Spider Solitaire with two suits. This game usually takes about five to seven minutes and successful solutions are sporadic. So playing the first two games and then three hands of solitaire will take about half an hour.

I am writing this because I just got done shuffling some pdf files over to the City of Portland Building Department. It wasn't difficult or complicated, but good lord how I hated it. It's an obligation and man oh man, I did not want to do it and I don't really understand why I am so resistant. There are multiple reasons why I should resent this, but none of them have any real standing in this situation. Come on dude, suck it up and get it done. Jeez.

The Queen's Gambit

The Queen's Gambit Limited Series Trailer | Rotten Tomatoes TV
Rotten Tomatoes TV
We started watching this mini-series this evening. It's pretty great. 

The Queen's Gambit is a fictional story that follows the life of an orphan chess prodigy, Beth Harmon, during her quest to become the world's greatest chess player while struggling with emotional problems and drug and alcohol dependency. - Wikipedia

There have been a few female chess champions, but not many. I don't know what makes this show so great, might just be because it is well told tale. There is always an undercurrent of tension, you get the feeling that something very bad could happen at any time. Nothing ever does (or least not yet, other than the opening incident, which is bad enough), but the potential is always there, or maybe I'm just paranoid. Or maybe I've watched too many thrillers that have same undercurrent of tension and then bad things do happen.

The film uses an imaginary chess board projected on the ceiling with the chess pieces hanging upside down to represent what is going on in the girl's mind. I have built models in my mind of some of the data structures I needed for computer programs I've written. Most data structures can be easily drawn on paper, they aren't too complicated, but you start shifting things around and it can quickly get very complicated. Individual actions can be easily drawn out on paper, but after a certain point you become familiar enough with what needs to be done that it's quicker and easier to do it in your head than to draw out all of the various actions on paper.

I've played a few games of chess but I never got the bug to pursue it. It's a lot of work for not much reward. If you're good, you can claim to be good, but that and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee at McDonald's. There is good money if you are really good, but that's kind of like being a professional athlete. There are a few people who make a bundle of money, but there are legions of people who were almost good enough. You have to be obsessed to pursue success fighting those kind of odds. I'm not that obsessed. That might be why I went into computer programming.

Update January 2022 replaced missing video. The missing video was from Netflix. Why would they pull a trailer?

Part 2 here.