As many of you are already aware, there was a significant breakthrough in our understanding of spin glasses earlier this week; someone has finally managed to map the Ising model to a board game. This accomplishment is chronicled on the MIT arXiv blog, here: https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/83c9cf45dcdd and, of course, in the corresponding arXiv paper, here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.1839.

In order to stay relevant in this highly competitive field, I believe we must procure a copy of this game for the group and possibly some of our collaborators. The game is somehow produced by this computational physics group (http://www.compphys.uni-oldenburg.de/en/) at the University of Oldenburg and its possible to buy it through the German language version of Amazon.com here: http://www.amazon.de/2274-5-Spinglas/dp/3814222741/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358255460&sr=8-1-fkmr1. Its 16 Euro.

I've already tried to buy the game. The only problem is that they will only ship to addresses in Germany (Salvatore and I already tried to ship it to his parents in Italy). This brings me to the point of the email: is anyone going to Germany? Does anyone have people visiting from Germany? I can arrange to buy the game and have it shipped to any address in Germany and will pay a courier fee.

Clearly, this is crucially important for research purposes.

Warm Regards,

Ryan