Winter Holiday (novel) Winter Holiday (novel) Winter Holiday is the fourth novel of Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" series of children's books. It was published in 1933. In this story, the third set of major characters in the series, the Ds — Dick and Dorothea Callum—are introduced. The series' usual emphasis on boats and sailing is largely absent, as the story is set in the winter. Instead, the children's activities focus on ice skating, signalling with semaphore and Morse code, and sledging. Ransome draws on his schoolday memories of the Great Frost of 1895 when Windermere froze completely. Another major influence is Fridtjof
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