Intuition for the nuts and bolts of the alpha-beta search algorithm.

Notes on Alpha-Beta

A proposal for an improvement to the way chess tactics puzzles are categorised and presented to the student.

Categorising Chess Tactics

The conclusions drawn in Bryan Caplan's book on education challenge some core assumptions about the value of EdTech.

EdTech's Biggest Challenge

After watching some games of football in this year's Euro 2020, and contrasting the game with tennis, I've figured out how to make it less boring.

Scoring systems make a big difference to the inherent excitement of spectator sports.

Football Scores

A proposal for a new type of database management system focussed on developer productivity, particularly in the domain of web application design.

Relational database systems like Postgres are powerful, but clunky to use. Here are some potential improvements.

Databases Need Better DX

It's easy to forget that almost all humans start out wanting – needing – to learn about the world around them. Babies and toddlers are infinitely curious... But as they grow older, we typically proceed to beat away this innate curiosity.

An underappreciated element of successful education, work and even fulfilment in life.

Curiosity

A simple SIR model of infectious disease spreading through a community, and how it is influenced by various relevant variables.

During Covid-19, I built a simple model of infectious disease in Typescript and D3.js

Modelling Infectious Disease

Travelling to the moon is, by far, the furthest a human being has ever travelled from his humble terrestrial origins. No space-farer before or since has made it beyond Low-Earth Orbit...

It's unfathomably massive, but there's hope we can visit distant worlds.

How to Explore the Universe

A few years ago, a friend described the rules of a game called Hex in a WhatsApp message, and asked me if I could prove that this game can never end in a draw.

Essays