English school holidays issued with a penalty notice whenever they take their children on holiday during term time without getting authorisation from the school. Penalty notices can be issued by local councils, headteachers (including deputy and assistant heads authorised by them) and the police. Generally, schools will agree to no more than 10 school days of absence in any school year. The Swallows and Amazons series of children’s novels by Arthur Ransome are all set in the school holidays, generally the long (August) summer holidays although some are set in Easter or winter. For example, in "Pigeon Post", he wrote: "Term time was
Game of the Amazons in 1994, and an updated version with graphics in Visual Basic in 1995. There are Amazons tournaments at the Computer Olympiad, a series of computer-versus-computer competitions. Usually, in the endgame, the board is partitioned into separate "royal chambers", with queens inside each chamber. We define simple Amazons endgames to be endgames where each chamber has at most one queen. Determining who wins in a simple Amazons endgame is NP-hard. This is proved by reducing it to finding the Hamiltonian path of a cubic subgraph of the square grid graph. Generalized Amazons (that is, determining the winner of a game of