01 — The company
A small company in Oslo that makes software for telephones.
Wood AS trades as Wood nor Apps. One registered address in Vestliveien, a short list of things built and published, and a person who reads the post.
There is no office to visit and no sales department to route you through. A page of this sort earns its keep in exactly two ways: it tells you who the company is in the register, and it gives you a line back to a human being. You will find both further down, and nothing on it pretending to be more than that.
02 — The register
Registered nameWood AS
Trading asWood nor Apps
ResponsibleAlexander Barratt
AddressVestliveien 9, 0750 Oslo, Norway
Enquiries[email protected]
About the app[email protected]
03 — One measurable thing
Looking everywhere twice costs about three times as much as looking everywhere once.
Searching is not one skill but two, and the difference between them is arithmetic rather than talent. Sweep a scene methodically and you never check the same place twice. Let your eye wander and you will — again and again — and the bill for that grows faster than it looks.
Mark a few spots and watch the two costs separate
The board below is a scene cut into 48 places worth checking. Click cells to hide anything you like in them — up to eight. Then the figures are the average number of checks needed to find every hidden thing: once by sweeping the board in some fixed order, once by glancing at random places and forgetting where you have already been.
4 of 48 places marked · click a cell to change it
With 5 things hidden among 48 places, a sweep finds them all in 40.8 checks on average and random glancing needs 109.6 — 2.7 times the work for exactly the same result.
A sweep is a random ordering of the 48 places checked once each, so the last of m marked places arrives on average at m(N+1)/(m+1). Random glancing is sampling with replacement, where seeing all m marked places takes N·(1 + 1/2 + … + 1/m) glances on average — the coupon-collector sum. Both formulas were checked against sixty thousand simulated searches per setting before being put on the page, and the simulation agreed to within a tenth of a check. Absent by design: there are no illustrations on the board, nothing is concealed from you, and marking a cell hides nothing you then have to recover. You place the targets yourself and the arithmetic answers back. Looking for something you cannot see is a separate activity, and it happens somewhere other than this website.
04 — A side line
One of the things we publish is a picture puzzle.
It is called Oppdag: two illustrated scenes side by side with a short list of changes between them, and you find them at whatever pace suits you. Offline, no sign-in, nothing sold inside it.
05 — Writing in
For the company, [email protected]. Questions touching Oppdag itself, or these pages, go to [email protected]. Paper arrives at Vestliveien 9 in Oslo.
Mail is read by a person rather than sorted by a system, so a plain sentence about what you need works better than a form would.