Interactive note · 3 min
How a game thinks
Change a score, follow a game tree, and see which branches an AI can safely ignore.
Game AI · minimax & alpha-beta pruning · from Maths Warriors
Writing & experiments
Explaining the mathematics behind the software I build. Change an assumption, follow the calculation, and see what happens.
- 3 explorable notes
- About 8 minutes to read them all
- From 2 real projects
- Maths Warriors and ContestKit
- 1 book, published
- A board game design course, co-written for SIMCC
Explorable notes
Each note is short, and each one has something to play with. The illustrations show what you’ll find inside.
Interactive note · 2 min
The weight of an upset
Why does beating a stronger opponent earn more rating? Move the sliders and watch the numbers change.
Competition mathematics · Elo ratings · from Maths Warriors
Interactive note · 3 min
A balanced problem set
Draw from a lopsided problem bank, then compare random sampling with a selection that accounts for topic and difficulty.
Contest design · sampling & constraints · from ContestKit
The book
Book · First edition, 2026 · SIMCC
A Beginner’s Guide to Board Games
Design, build, test and share a game of your own.
A full-colour course book that teaches secondary school students to design, build, test, and present a board game of their own. Every chapter works on one deliberately broken example game, Market Day, and fixes a little more of it.
- Authors
- Samputhy Khim and Henry Ong
- Readers
- Students aged 12–17, and their teachers
- Structure
- 5 parts · 28 lessons · 261 pages
- Inside
- About 45,000 words · 64 figures · photocopiable worksheets
Format inspiration: Bartosz Ciechanowski’s interactive explanations.