I’m slapping in plug-ins to get some of the basic functionality we need. Hopefully Geocoding will be able to do with an existing plugin.

Most notably, now that we are in WordPress anyone can sign in and start writing posts. More to come on that later, but this will remove the bottleneck of the RSM administrator having to post everything.

Hello faithful fans of Road Sign Math! I’m here to give you all an update on the future of our wonderful driving game. Anyone that frequents the website will notice that sign postings have dried up almost completely. This isn’t for lack of signs being found, I have about 50 of them in my incoming mailbox. It is however just a pure lack of time to do the work. It takes 10-15 minutes as it stands to post a single sign on Road Sign Math. You can do the math…

The challenge is actually even worse since when signs are posted that typically encourages people to submit more signs, which is great, but doesn’t provide any pressure relief on the backlog. The principle problem here is a serialized posting process limited by a very busy RSM Administrator!

I had big plans in the past of writing a brand new website for RSM built on Ruby on Rails. The idea was to create something sort of like the Geocaching website that would free RSM from the bonds of my time limitations and allow people to run with the concepts on their own. However, after a few months of trying to do this it became incredibly obvious that this was going to take far too much time. This path wasn’t viable.

However, in the time since then I’ve discovered WordPress. WordPress is principally a blogging package (RSM is currently running on a blogging package called .Text). However, WordPress has incredible flexibility thanks to WordPress Extensions, and it has a tremendous amount of momentum behind it. Extensions are out there that will meet the majority of the needs of Road Sign Math! In fact, in the new version we will have forums, tagging and hopefully even user-generated ratings!

There is only one big gap — obviously there is no extension that will implement the Road Sign Math scoring system. However, I’ve contracted with a consultant to build a WordPress extension that will implement the scoring system in the WordPress administration pages. Once this migration is over all Road Sign Math players will have a login so that you can all go in and post your signs yourself (in fact, if you have signs in the queue I will be sending these back to you to post yourself). In a week or so I will post a URL here so you can try out the new version of the site. There will be no new signs posted here as all my time for Road Sign Math will be spent making the migration to WordPress. It is possible that the new scoring system will lag the relaunch slightly, in which case we may go for a month or so without scores.

I’m very excited about this direction because I know it can get done. Stay tuned for more updates… and as always…

Remember,

Since the first day that we launched Road Sign Math we have wanted to include constant signs. It seems completely crazy to have a game that is about the fun of mathematical relationships while driving and exclude such great constants like Pi. However, incorporating constants into the game has proven harder than expected. Constant signs were intended to be really rare. They were supposed to be something truly special. A gem that you would treasure for years to come. However, they have become completely common and far too easy to achieve.

The original example of a constant sign was

this has an elegance to it that is lost in the multitude of approximations that we have seen proliferating on Road Sign Math.

In fact, a quick count shows that a full 12% of all winning signs currently on the site are constants. A huge number of these are Pi winners using the ever common

Indeed we had to remove many trigonometry functions because they allowed constants to be approximated far too easily. The most recent solution to cause a huge problem with the rules as stated is

Thus any sign that you can get to 98, you can get to Pi. This is simply too easy and violates the spirit of the game.

Solution

To solve this problem, we are going to alter the rules for constant sign winners to keep it in accordance with the original intent. We understand that this rule change will make constant signs much harder to find, and that is indeed the desired impact. Here are the modifications.

1. The only constants that you can solve for are Pi (3.14159…) and Euler’s constant (2.718…).
2. You can use any math allowed by the rules to solve for the constant, and you must match to at least 2 decimal places.
3. The solution must match exactly for all decimals returned in the equation. You cannot truncate any decimals.

Example

To illustrate this let’s look at a solution for Pi that works to 4 decimal places.

Odds & Ends

Existing constant winners will be grandfathered in as is stated in the rules. We are going to consider changing the scoring values for future constant signs to account for the difficulty in achieving them.

This is a difficult change and we expect some will be frustrated by it. Please leave your comments here, we are interested in hearing them. However, we feel strongly that this rule change will improve the game play of the site and will make the constant sign the special gem that it was intended to be.

Remember,

Road Sign Math continues to blaze new ground today announcing the addition of an KML interface to bring the great signs of Road Sign Math into Google Earth. If you have not installed Google Earth, go download it and install it. After you have installed it simply launch the Road Sign Math Google Earth KML file by clicking below:

This URL will launch Google Earth and grab all of the signs from Road Sign Math and allow you to start flying around! Warning, we here at Road Sign Math have found this incredibly addicting. One of the great things is you can click on the signs in Google Earth and bring up the winner with it’s formula inside an embedded browser in Google Earth. Huge fun! Enjoy!

Really, go get Google Earth now and give this a try!

Remember,

Road Sign Math has attracted orders of magnitude more attention than could have ever been expected. We now have dozens of people playing the game all over the United States, including some people playing from foreign countries.

The game continues to evolve and strategy gets more and more complicated. We are working on a completely brand new version of the game to launch sometime before the end of the year (more about that later).

In order to allow players to communicate with each other to discuss, well, whatever, we have created a listserve for RSM Players. You can subscribe by sending an email to rsm-players-subscribe@lists.roadsigngames.com or visiting this web page and signing up.

We look forward to hearing from you on the mailing list!

Remember,

Effective immediately the judging committee of Road Sign Math has authorized two substantive changes to the game. We expect that these rule changes may be controversial, however, we are resolute in the changes.

The first change is a new math rule, E1, that has removed trigonometry functions from the game as well as logarithm and natural logarithm. James Bernard, a winner in the game, pointed out a critical flaw with the inclusion of sine and cosine when combined with factorial. Since 6! is 720, which is exactly two times 360, you can effectively make any number of 6 or more a 1 or 0 by using a sine or cosine with a factorial. This has not been exploited as of yet in the game, but we are going to close it out before it can be.

Additionally we are removing logarithm and natural logarithm as they have been used too frequently to derive constant signs. There are simply too many constant signs being submitted. They should be rare, and these functions are allowing too many winners.

The last change is related to constants. Effective immediately we will only allow constant signs that do not have units. This has been debated at some length for many months with the judging committee. We have determined that constants with units introduce a problem of variants. For example, the constant of gravity could be feet per second or meters per second. As a result, we will only allow purely numeric constants.

All previously submitted signs are still winners, and they will retain their full point value. This follows the precedence established when modulo was banned from the game.

We expect these changes will keep the game closer to it’s roots. Keep up the hunt for new signs, and new states!

Remember,

RSM is a game about math, not really a game about numerology. We do have a sign type for numerology, but nobody has ever submitted a winning numerology sign.

While this is somewhat off topic, we thought it only worthwhile that RSM should take note of an instant in time today.

1:02:03am 4/5/06

Such wonderful sequences of numbers rarely appear in road signs, and even more rarely do they occur in time.

Remember,

Though the picture actually does not include any math, per say, Chris makes a strong argument for it’s inclusion in Road Sign Math. He writes:

First off, there is an obvious connection between the sign and the people posing below the sign. This connection could be expressed in a mathematical like way, for example:

Chris continues to point out that there are some other surprising relationships in the picture. For example, there are four girls and four guys and fifteen letters in the sign. So it only follows:

Chris recognized that some judgment would need to be made in validating and scoring the sign. “I recognize that the governing board of Road Sign Math might quibble about whether my friend Jarred, facing the camera, would qualify as an ‘official’ guy butt. You can’t really see his butt, not nearly as clearly as the others pictured. I know this is covered somewhat in the ‘field of view’ section of the rules, but I would argue that his butt is clearly visible in profile. Unlike a road sign, you don’t need to see the whole butt to know what it is. And as an added bonus it is being held by one of his companions which should count for something.”

The Road Sign Math Administrators were quick to jump into the fray. “I have to say that this sign really carries the spirit of the game,” one administrator said. “Like the sign that inspired RSM, Genesis, this submission really makes you stop and think.”

While stopping short of suggesting submissions of silly signs or signs featuring the posteriors of RSM enthusiasts, RSM judges were clearly voting for the sign. “It’s a valid submission that won’t score big on the technical indicator but will top our elegance chart. Because if Driving + Math = Fun, Driving + Ass = AWESOME.”

One year ago Road Sign Math was a brand new “feature” of the Internet. With two, wimpy signs from Iowa the game of hunting for mathematically significant roadsigns was started. We really thought that Road Sign Math would be an esoteric site with few visitors. If wildly successful, we thought we might get 30 signs sent in the first year.

Now, 143 signs later from 39 regions we look back at the first-year as a huge success. We’ve evolved the rules from to the just released 3rd edition. We’ve added scoring to Road Sign Math creating a new opportunity for people to flex their heads in a variety of different ways. Road Sign Math has been highlighted on major sites, including the public radio show Cartalk.

To commemorate the first-year of Road Sign Math, Suzanne Merideth created this amazing collage bringing every winner together in one poster. What a wonderful retrospective!

If you would like to make your own poster you can download a high resolution version of this poster (12.1MB, please right click and select Save as)

As a point of trivia, if you add up all the numbers in the 143 mathematically significant signs it totals 58,604. The largest number to appear in a sign is 4,002 in Wellsboro. Additionally, addition is by far the most frequently used function with subtraction, multiplication and square root being very common as well.

A snapshot of the standings after one year.

Region Competition

1. Massachusetts, USA with 171.5 and 29 signs
2. Pennsylvania, USA with 146.5 and 18 signs
3. Minnesota, USA with 67.7 and 10 signs
4. California, USA with 66.3 and 9 signs
5. Florida, USA with 47.2 and 6 signs

Player Competition

1. David Slauenwhite at 266.8 points with 33 signs
2. Randy Weiss at 177.7 points with 31 signs
3. Jamie Thingelstad at 109.1 points with 20 signs
4. Roger Knowles at 90.1 points with 12 signs
5. Dave Oosterhuis at 45.8 points with 7 signs

Sign Competition

1. Castle Pi from David Slauenwhite at 19.4 points
2. Euler? Anybody? from David Slauenwhite at 16 points
3. Woodstock from Randy Weiss at 13.5 points
4. Triggly Wiggly from David Slauenwhite at 13.3 points
5. Just The Numbers from Rosalin Chrest at 12.6 points

We can only hope the 2nd year is as successful as the first!

Remember,

We are excited to release the 3rd edition of the rules for Road Sign Math on the eve of the first anniversary of the launch of the game. This 3rd edition clears up some minor confusion and provides further clarity around certain areas. The biggest change is in the way the elegance score is calculated for a sign.

Previously the elegance score was calculated in three steps giving 1, 3 or 5 points depending on the number. This didn’t allow for much differentiation, and as a result the top 20 signs had 4-way and 6-way ties for certain spots. We have switched to a more specific scoring mechanism that calculates the score for any number using an adjusted natural logarithm. One new result of this that we really like is that 1 is now worth 0 points in elegance. The graph below shows the difference between the 2nd edition score and the 3rd edition score. This will clearly provide for more differentiation.

In addition to these scoring changes we have also provided further clarification on grandfathering in old signs on rule changes. It is important to note that scoring changes are not grandfathered, and as a result of the scoring change above all sign scores have been adjusted. The top signs haven’t dramatically been shaken up, but there were a number of changes.

The other significant rule change is a new math rule ruling out the use of “trivial math”. This specifically states that you cannot use math that results in the same number provided. So, 2! is no longer allowed since it results in the same number. The same is true for the square root of 1.

We recommend a quick run through the 3rd edition rules to familiarize yourself with any other items that have changed. Now let’s get some more mathematically significant roadsigns.

Remember,