The date is the title...

J. Venn - Logic of Chance

Turtle Graphics?

The above, looks suspiciously like a printout from my first session with Apple Logo (the language, not the branding), before I figured the command for "pen up"...

A few months back, I was reading a few books and found the above in one of them. It is titled "Logic of Chance", by John Venn (mostly known for the Venn diagram). The year? 1866.

So, where were we? Ah yes...

3/14/16

Yes, that famous sequence of number. What was the story with John Venn and pi, here? Whereas I used digits 0-9 in "the 10 colors of pi", John used digits 0-7, discarding all 8s and 9s. Since back then there were no computers, he picked his numbers from a book (by R. Shank) which had 707 digits of pi, leaving him with 568 digits between 0 and 7. He mapped 0 to 7 to directions (10 directions might have felt a bit odd, at 36 degrees, versus nice 45 degree lines):

Although he doesn't specify the mapping, it is easy to infer from the graph. The first digit after the decimal is 1, then 4 and we can see the path as NE, then S, so:

0	N
1	NE
2	E
3	SE
4	S
5	SW
6	W
7	NW

The random walk

He would then move by 1 unit in the direction of each digit / direction mapping. NE, S, NE, SW, skip 9, E, so on and so forth. (NB: This is easy to reproduce in python with the turtle module. A quick search of my blog will get you started on this, from a pi generator to import turtle.)

His conclusion stated: 

"The result seems to me to furnish a very fair graphical indication of randomness". 

Francois Dion
@f_dion

The return of the Los Alamos Memo 10742 -

Modern rendering of the original 1947 Memo 10742

The mathematician prankster

Can you imagine yourself receiving this memo in your inbox in Washington in 1947? There's a certain artistic je ne sais quoi in this memo...

This prank was made by J Carson Mark and Stan Ulam.  A&S was Administration and Services.

And Ulam, well known for working on the Manhattan project, also worked on really interesting things in mathematics. Specifically, a collaboration with Nicholas Constantine Metropolis and John Von Neumann. You might know this as the Monte Carlo method (so named due to Ulam's uncle always asking for money to go and gamble in a Monte Carlo casino...). Some people have learned about a specific Monte Carlo simulation (the first) known as Buffon's needle.

Copying the prankster

When I stumbled upon this many years ago, I decided that it would make a fantastic programming challenge for a workshop and/or class. I first tried it in a Java class, but people didn't get quite into it. Many years later I redid it as part of a weekly Python class I was teaching at a previous employer.

The document is the output of a Python script. In order to make the memo look like it came from the era, I photocopied it. It still didn't look quite right, so I then scanned that into Gimp, bumped the Red and Blue in the color balance tool to give it that stencil / mimeograph / ditto look.

Your assignment

Here is what I asked the students:

"Replicate either:
a) the whole memo
or
b) the list of numbers 

Whichever assignment you choose, the numbers must be generated programmatically."

That was basically it. So, go ahead and try it. In Python. Or in R, or whatever you fancy and post a solution as a comment.

We will come back in some days (so everybody gets a chance to try it) and present some possible methods of doing this. Oh, and why the title of "the return of the Los Alamos Memo"? Well, I noticed I had blogged about it before some years back, but never detailed it...

Learning more on Stan Ulam

See the wikipedia entry and also:

LOS ALAMOS SCIENCE NO. 15, 1987

[EDIT: Part 2 is at: los-alamos-10742-making-of.html]

Francois Dion
@f_dion