Weekly Link Dump for 2010-05-21

• North American video game crash of 1983
  The North American video game crash of 1983 brought an abrupt end to what is considered the second generation of console video gaming in North America. It almost destroyed the then-fledgling industry and led to the bankruptcy of several companies producing home computers and video game consoles in North America.
• Ghost Army (WWII)
  The Ghost Army was a United States Army tactical deception unit during World War II, given a unique mission within the Army to impersonate other U.S. Army units in order to fool the enemy. They put on a traveling road show, using inflatable tanks, sound trucks, phony radio transmissions and even playacting.
• Constellation Diagram
  A constellation diagram is a representation of a signal modulated by a digital modulation scheme such as quadrature amplitude modulation or phase-shift keying. It displays the signal as a two-dimensional scatter diagram in the complex plane at symbol sampling instants.
• The Curse of Dimensionality
  The curse of dimensionality is the problem caused by the exponential increase in volume associated with adding extra dimensions to a (mathematical) space. The term was coined by Richard Bellman.
• Cake Number
  A cake number is the maximum number of pieces into which a 3-dimensional space can be cut with a given number of plane cuts. It is so called because one imagines each such slice cutting a cake. The sequence of cake numbers for n = 0, 1, 2, 3… is 1, 2, 4, 8, 15, 26…

Images:
Atari, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from farnea’s photostream
German chocolate cake, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from stuart_spivack’s photostream