Welcome, Robin!

Robin Ryder started his new blog with his different solutions to Le Monde puzzle of last Saturday (about the algebraic sum of products…), solutions that are much more elegant than my pedestrian rendering. I particularly like the one based on the Jacobian of a matrix! (Robin is doing a postdoc in Dauphine and CREST—under my supervision—on ABC and other computational issues, after completing a PhD in Oxford on philogenic trees for language history with Geoff Nicholls. His talk at the Big’MC seminar last month is reproduced there.)

And, in a totally unrelated way, here is the Sudoku (in Le Monde) that started my post on simulated annealing, nicely represented on Revolutions. (Although I cannot see why the central columns are set in grey…) I must mention that I am quite surprised at the number of visits my post received, given that using simulated annealing for solving Sudokus has been around for a while. Even my R code, while original, does not compete with simulated annealing solutions that take a few seconds… I thus completely share Dirk Eddelbuettel‘s surprise in this respect (but point to him that Robin’s blog entry has nothing to do with Sudokus, but with another Le Monde puzzle!)