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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Yep. It really depends on if you have to replace some basic hardware like pipes, tanks, and valves that you can do with sheet metal and a welding tool, or if they blew up the control center with the computers and the specialized hardware. Or maybe some of the specialized pumps and valves. Those are expensive, and so nobody has large quantities lying around.

    When the Russians hit the Ukrainian power grid, the Ukrainians can get replacement parts from all over Europe and the rest of the world. But Russia has the problem that those parts are high up on the embargo lists, so they have to get either Chinese parts (which may need modifications on them or the controlling software), or smuggle the original items.





  • That was over 40 years ago. It was called “Water Carrier”. It created a random labyrinth with an entry on the left and an exit on the right, and a number of puddles in it. You could not cross the puddles, but had to “pick them up” with your bucket. Of course, only one puddle fit in that bucket, so you had to empty it at the entrance in order to scoop up the next puddle on your way to the exit. For scoring, it counted the number of steps one needed to get through.

    The labyrinth was one of the algorithmic challenges I had as a kid. There was no internet to look up algorithms like that, and the local libraries had no computer related books. So I invented the algorithm myself. Same with sorting, for the “high scores”, which were actually “low scores”, the less steps you needed, the better. For that, I “invented” what I many years later learned was Bubble Sort.

    And sorry, no link to it ;-)