24

“I am free and that is why I am lost.” — Franz Kafka

Note: this post was written mostly in November but was released on Dec 15th.

24

24 Points is a game I’ve played since middle school.

It’s a simple game: draw four cards from a deck of playing cards and make the number 24 using all of the cards while being able to use +, -, /, * in any order and quantity. Jack is 11, Queen is 12, King is 13.

I remember a grade tournament where E would smoke everyone from the other classes, and I still respect E to this day as one of the GOATs of this game.

Later on, another student M made an app for iOS to allow people to play anywhere. It’s a pretty fun game and I recommend downloading 24 Points by M on the App Store.

Overfit

My friends at school started playing it last month and have gotten pretty good. It requires a certain kind of intuition that you can’t get unless you play the game a lot.

Last time I checked with E in high school, he had already played 30k+ hands of 24. That means he’s seen every combination of possible multiple times.

The first day playing with J, E, and R, we noticed that J was way too fast (because he practiced). To even the playing field, we played 21 points instead, and J started struggling a little.

Adapting

When dropped into a new environment, the first thing people seem to do is find out as much as possible and identify all the patterns.

However, after a certain point, the patterns get locked, and it turns from pattern recognition to memorization. That’s what seemed to happen to us as we got better at the game.

By swapping the number, there’s a sense of testing true skill in terms of using similar patterns with different numbers.

Strategies

I noticed everyone’s general skills:

• E likes a balanced binary tree sort of approach where you take two groups of two cards and you test all the combinations between them. This is a generally good approach for multiplication since 24 has a lot of factors.
• R sees a stack of operators and functions, like ((…) + 3) * 6 sort of, which allows him to find unusual addition and subtraction combinations. He might go to a seemingly random number like 50 and then subtract 26, something like that.
• J seems to know a bit too much so he employs a lot of strategies…

Crawl

I haven’t posted for a while or written anything because I’ve been really busy with homework up to recently. So, I couldn’t do much reflection on myself or my actions, which is bad.

The main reason is that I got some pretty bad midterm grades which made me feel a little bit doomed. However, looking back, it doesn’t seem like tunnel vision but it doesn’t seem like it was as bad as it seemed.

Sometimes, the only way out is forward, and you can’t let every bump in the road stop you.

Hard way

I learned that the hard way by falling off my skateboard four times within a month. Every time the scab was almost gone, I fell again and it just started bleeding again.

Sure, I could blame the people who don’t pave the roads properly or the guy who was smoking ahead of me on the sidewalk that caused me to go onto the road at an inconvenient angle, but there’s no point in getting mad or upset about things I can’t control.

The same is true for my test grades. I certainly could have prepared a lot better instead of playing games or reading webtoons. It just makes me wonder: how many times am I going to repeat the same mistakes without changing?

Vision

I went swimming with J at night last week and hit my toe on the wall as I was kicking, which bruised it and led to my skateboarding being weaker.

Right before my last fall after my front wheel got stuck inside of a large crack, I had a premonition that I would fall if I wasn’t going fast enough.

I’ve known about that crack for a long time and I go over it an average of once a day.

This time I went uphill to the crack reasonably fast. I got real close, saw my fate, and fell.

Luckily it didn’t do much damage because I was pretty slow, but I learned something new. The crack gets bigger in the middle, which is in the middle of the street. So, next time, I’ll just go to the side.

enough

It’s really the worst feeling to know almost certainly that something bad will happen and then be powerless to stop it.

I think that’s the only time I get angry. Ignorance and stupidity are fine, but I just can’t handle smarts with no wisdom.

already

In CS 24, a computer systems class, I sometimes see cool things that I want to understand not personally, but for the sake of teaching others.

I have an ongoing correspondence with a lot of my high school teachers about the cool things I’m learning.

Normally, I ignore bonus credit assignments unless it’s easy to do. However, there are some things I see that I just need to do because it’s interesting just to say that I did it.

For example, in CS 24, for bonus points, we could add a link to the professor’s website through a little hack. Originally I didn’t intend to do it, but it’s pretty cool to say, “I hacked a website.”

Also upcoming is a general adversarial network (GAN) assignment for machine learning class, so I think I’ll do that too.

Back up

There are a lot of people who seem to have it together but I think that’s just because things always seem better by comparison when you aren’t in a great situation.

Only after some suffering do you realize that everyone is actually in the same boat.

fine

I was in the room during a Zoom call that my roommate had with the professor where he was getting grilled on some technical subject and he couldn’t really explain it clearly but it was exactly what the TA told him to do.

He went outside walking around for a few hours to cool off but it didn’t seem like that bad of a situation to me.

I get that feeling though, of having to fight the uphill battle after stumbling. It doesn’t feel good, but there are always things to do.

For example, after a bad test grade comes out, it doesn’t mean that you’re just doomed, you can still do things like regrade requests or try to study harder.

Reading

It seems like smart people seem to enjoy reading a lot, so I bought some investing books on Amazon and I hope to get something out of them.

Mental space

Something interesting about grinding programming problems is that a big part of solving the problem is just recognizing the type and memorizing how problems of that type are solved.

There is often much less skill involved in the math and more in just understanding the type of algorithm and how to type it.

Stock Trading

I’ve gotten more into trading stocks along with my roommate E and it’s fun to see how the stocks we pick perform. We have different personalities and sometimes his actions seem strange to me, but it probably seems completely reasonable to him.

This is something I learned in The Psychology of Money, one of the first books I’ve read in a while. It’s actually a great read and I recommend it for everyone even if they aren’t interested in financial markets.

My favorite chapter is when the author describes how everyone has different goals for doing things. For example, E mostly trades for fun, so it doesn’t really matter if he doesn’t hold for a long time because he does not intend to sit still for too long.

So, it doesn’t really matter if I think what he’s doing makes any sense because we aren’t in the same boat anyway.

Doctor Who

At Caltech there are Health Advocates in each house who are responsible for providing first aid and things like that. In the health ad course, they were learning how to take people’s blood pressure and needed 10 samples from the population.

E and I got a little bit scared by the results since I got a reading of 130/85, which is the first stage of high blood pressure. I’m not sure how representative the reading was of my average BP, but E and I did have some unhealthy diets that needed to change.

Candy Crush

Over the next week, E consumed significantly fewer cookies from RD. Typically, he would eat 3 per day, which is approximately 500-600 calories, and made up a third of all the calories he gets every day.

As for me, I was definitely eating too many greasy and deep-fried foods to be healthy. So, I ordered a chicken salad from some kind of healthy restaurant for dinner one day. It was kind of good but I wouldn’t want to eat that every day.

By the next week, I had about 115 and E was also down a lot to around 105 which is much better than before.

With that, let’s end this post and continue on the next one.