Pay attention to the trade-offs: How the AI cornered me and I eventually tricked it to give up its Queen while it predicted it’d get a new one anyway…which I prevented. Also, the timing of my castling was vital in order to get the upper hand and do the checkmate.
Category: Education
A basic spin-slot game in…Excel??
With Excel’s toolbox of thousands of formulas and VBA support, it’s not out of question to be able to create games although it’s not designed for that purpose. However, not for the sake of playing, rather for experimentation and learning, I decided to present a simple form of a spin game. Game Rules Have 2 […]
Ranked, custom charts and animation (Excel)
In this blog, I share how to use simple data, and create some meaningful charts, even with animation and custom graphics. Along the way, I’ll demonstrate techniques to rank and spark some ideas on PowerPoint<->Excel interaction. Let’s start with the dataset. Following are the responses from a survey of 1,002 consumers from a couple of […]
Beating Level 5 AI (Chess)
In a “noisy” all-out attack by the AI, backed up into my own back line, I saw the opportunity with 1 move, but had to prepare for that final move by keeping the AI busy while fending off its checks. But I found it and it was soon over 🙂
Fight to the end-Draw vs AI (Chess)
An interesting game video between me and the AI where we had a blood bath early in the game and it had recouped its Queen, lost it again, and then betted on getting another one, but alas, it didn’t and it came down to one pawn advantage…finally only the kings remained.
Timelapse animation in Excel
Not long ago I demonstrated how to create and share animated charts using Excel (search for “soccer” or “excel” in the search box of my site). Here, I present a cool 3D chart created in Excel with various dimensions including time and geo-location. This animation is based on a dataset for power stations across different […]
Random Fun with Excel
This is a seemingly useless but visually fun usage of visuals, combined with Excel functions and VBA I did to take a break from my typical gnarly Excel analytics work 🙂 How it works: 1. Fill in a formula to generate random numbers between 1 and 100 (inclusive) across the cell range. 2. Apply 2 […]
A simple dataset with many questions (and answers!)
I’ll start with a simple dataset and demonstrate how many critical questions can arise just from this. You can now imagine in a real-world situation, how many more complex questions can be asked and information gleaned! But if we can’t extract the key answers from this table, we won’t be able to tackle even the […]
Simple & brilliant way to extract multiple matches in one cell
 The scenario: You have a dataset with values in one column that’s unique (or semi-unique) and another column with its associated values as Key:Value pairs but that column has repeating values. Imagine a list of members whose names are in one column and their corresponding membership status next to it as below: What we […]
How many real days…net? (Excel)
This is one of the simple and yet powerful tips when working with Dates in Excel. To calculate the number of workdays between two dates BUT EXCLUDING weekends (depending on your locale settings), we can use NETWORKDAYS(). In US and most western countries, Saturdays and Sundays would be excluded from the calculation. Without changing your […]