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In 1782, Leonhard Euler imagined arranging 36 officers in a square so that no regiment and no rank repeated in any row or column. He couldn't solve it. The structure he imagined, Graeco-Latin squares, became a cornerstone of combinatorics. I turned i...

It started one night after seeing one of those YouTube ads claiming you could make a living publishing books on Amazon KDP. I don’t usually fall for that kind of thing, but this time I thought: what do I actually have to lose? So I started planning. ...

There’s brute force — and then there’s brute force with a brain. That’s what backtracking is.It’s the art of exploring possibilities... but only until you realize it’s a waste of time. Then you back out faster than when someone says, “We need to talk...

By Ali Spittel This article will be part technical, part personal story, and part cultural critique. If you are just here for the code and explanation, jump to the The Initial Approach header! This story starts a few years ago in a college computer s...
