My son, now 25, was a McNuggets fan. Can you blame him? They’re delicious. He’s always been into numbers and puzzles, so I introduced him to the McNuggets problem when he was about 10.

Back to the basics with basic

Let’s say for a moment that we’ve got an ordered list of numbers.

What is an LFSR?

An LFSR is a Linear Feedback Shift Register. It’s a simple way of generating a sequence of numbers that look random.

I was recently on a video call with a friend, throwing around some ideas for a new product. I mentioned adding large signed numbers in assembly and using two’s complement. He asked me what two’s complement was. I was a little surprised that he didn’t know. He’s been a Java programmer for more than 30 years. Java and Python programmers (and others like gasp Commodore / MicroSoft BASIC) don’t have a native unsigned integer type. The language takes care of the details for you.

I built the world’s worst paper tape reader some weeks ago. It works pretty okay on anything with a USR-style port like a KIM-1 clone or a VIC-20.

Last year, we did the 100 door problem on many platforms in BASIC and Assembly language.

Someone asked me this week if I would help him with a graph theory problem on 8-Bit machines. The first task was to get all permutations of 1 to 9. Since the total permutations is 9! (362,880) I knew this would take a while.