Adam Jaamour∎

After playing Pokémon Crystal on my modded GameBoy Color for the past months, I wanted to share some of the maths that made me appreciate this classic even more.

Bugged Catch Rates of legendary Pokémon Lugia

I play most when travelling, commuting or on vacation. After almost finishing in the span of 3 months, I reached the point where I needed to catch one of the legendary Pokémon: Lugia. However, I knew from my vast experience playing Pokémon since the age of 7 that they are really hard to catch without a Master Ball (for context, a Master Ball guarantees a 100% success rate - but I had already used it for another Pokémon, and you only get one per game). The ideal strategy consists of bringing the enemy to 1 health point remaining, alter its status (e.g, to asleep, frozen, paralysed, burned or poisoned) and use Ultra Balls (the best one available after the Master Ball) to increase the catch rate per attempt.

So that was my approach, but little did I know that a bug unknown to me at the time would make it much harder to catch Lugia…

As stamp collector, I wanted to find a way to get more stamps and use nice ones in postage. Therefore, during the Covid pandemic in 2020, I stumbled upon PostCrossing and gave it a go to attempt getting more stamps to add to my collection. Postcrossing ended up becoming a very enjoyable hobby, at first during lockdown, and more recently when travelling to another country as it allows to discover their postal services and stamps from the POV of a local. Today, I have sent enough postcards to almost cover the distance to the Moon and back!

In 2023, I watched less movies than I did I previous years (likely due to the good weather and Covid not being a thing anymore). I watched a total of 68 movies (110 in 2022, 123 in 2021 and 137 in 2020), which amounted to:

• 138.1 hours watch time
• 5.7 movies on average per month (1.3 per week)

I recently completed my first half-marathon (21.1km or 13.2 miles) in December: the London Richmond Half-Marathon!

I had initially set out to complete this challenge in the first half of 2022, but got injured during the race (only completed 8km before my knee let go). This was due to poor training intensity and poor running form. A long break from running and many physio sessions later and I was finally able to complete my first race.

I had initially set the goal of completing it in sub-2h (after seeing how well the training was going as I was finally running correctly), but discovered a couple of weeks before that the race was classified as a “trail” run with a lot of elevation changes. So I had to accept the reality that I had trained for a flat race but was about to face a hilly one, and therefore removed the sub-2h idea from my head to avoid a repeat of my 2022 attempt. Here is the Strava post with a lot of details of each split:

Back in July, I bought a GameBoy Color for £10, and decided to mod it so I could emulate my youth and play Pokémon Crystal during an upcoming 1-month trip.

However, I had no experience modding consoles, and no soldering experience. But thanks to my partner and to YouTube, I opted for the best mods I could find that I had confidence I could complete without losing the console. Here is a before & after of the project:

I completed the National 3 Peaks Challenge on June 9th-11th, raising a total of £25000 as a group (£1045 individually) for the charity Family Action.

The challenge consisted of climbing the 3 tallest mountains in the UK in less than 24 hours. The challenge was completed in 23h43m:

1. Peak 1/3: Ben Nevis (Scotland) - 1345m high - 5h39m46s:

While taking the “Information Visualisation” class during my Master’s in AI, one of our practicals consisted in calculating our 2019 carbon footprint (greenhouse gases, including CO2/CH4/N2O, that are built up from various everyday activities such as food, travel, living and shopping) via the WWF carbon footprint calculator and visualising it following the format of the Dear Data project as a postcard. The front of postcard contains the visualisation and the back contains the key to read it:

The next section cover:

• How the different attributes from the carbon footprint calculator were visualised.
• If the visualisation follow the principles of expressiveness and effectiveness by T. Munzner.
• A discussion of the visualisation’s advantages and limitations.