Skidoos and Skidon’ts
Well, I had a lovely christmas vacation back in the land of frost and snow. We’re back in downtown Dublin ready to celebrate the new orbit.
Christine & I had a fun time earlier in the week learning to snowmobile in the deep powder on her parent’s farm. The thing about snowmobiling in powder, we learned, is that normal steering is very inneffective. With much effort you can gradually force a wide turning radius through the snow. Christine’s brother Brian taught us how to turn like the pros. It’s counter-intuitive, but you steer in the opposite direction you want to turn, and lean your body weight into the turn. This causes the skidoo to sink into the powder and flip on it’s side. The first few times I tried this, I flipped it right over, and fell off. The trick is to play with the throttle and your body weight to find the sweet balancing point between being completely on your side but not quite tipping. The throttle provides thrust to keep from flipping, and forces the skidoo into a tight turn. Super-fun.
Hi, Aaron,
How fast is Poker Academy’s hand evaluator? I have got a Java 7-card evaluator, which can enumerate all possible 133M 7-card hands in 11 sec and 1.7M 2-hand heads-up combinations in 280 msec. Is it close to Poker Academy’s?
sigh. apr0n has forsaken us. saddenz.
Jing: a current 2+2 thread discusses code for doing the enumeration in about half a second (around 10 cycles per hand!). A Java version should be available at pokersource fairly soon.