Chronicles of Nikhil Baliga

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " Life is a game in which only the fittest survive " I have always found geopolitics to be a fascinating subject. The world is composed of groups of people who have divided the Earth into various chunks. Peaceniks like to say that the world is one family - "Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam". However, the world doesn't run on such idealism. Many countries, in reality, are trying to increase their spheres of influence while trying to undermine their rivals. Some countries vie for regional dominance while others try to be superpowers. Any country that is seeking to be a dominant player in the game of geopolitics tries to subjugate their competition by adopting a few tried and tested techniques. One of them is the use of financial pressure. The US, with her dominant position as the world's largest economy, is able to pressurise other countries such as Iran, Korea and Russia through sanctions. By imposing trade embargos and preventing other ...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " You can always make a mundane problem interesting by thinking about scaling it " Tic Tac Toe used to be one of the standard games played by us in school along with Dots and Bingo. The problem with Tic Tac Toe is the frequent draws you end up with once you are familiar with the game. Eventually, it gets really boring and you stop playing the game. One day, I stumbled upon a blog post at Math With Bad Drawings, called Ultimate Tic Tac Toe . The post discusses this problem of Tic Tac Toe and comes up with a very interesting approach. In this post, I have provided an implementation of their idea for you guys to play. While you can read the entire content in that post, I will summarise it here. Rules: You are provided by a 3x3 board of Tic Tac Toe boards. That's 9 boards. The first player can make his move in any square. The next player has to make his move in the board depending on the square in which the previous player made his mar...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " Our short term memory is only as good as... uh oh, I think I lost my train of thought " We have two types of memory - Long Term Memory, which like our hard disks allow us to remember things for a longer duration, like names, faces, places and other memories; and Short Term Memory, which is like cache, used to remember things for a brief moment, like the OTP that we get on our phones. We remember that OTP long enough to enter into our computers and then a minute later - *poof* it's gone! This is a simple game that shows you a grid and highlights a bunch of squares randomly for a short period of time. You have to remember the highlighted squares and select them. See how far you can go! Click on Start Game  below You may also be interested in The Knight's Tour .