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Course update log

Dated history of changes to this knowledge bundle (OKF §9), newest first. Bullets are prefixed Initialization / Creation / Update / Deprecation / Removal.

2026-09-17

  • Creation: one page per problem named in Professor Winfree's schedule, 55 in all, under Problems. Each gives the statement, why it is in the course, where it comes from, hints and a resolution folded away, figures, and sources with access markers. Pages say plainly when the editors could not be sure which problem Winfree assigned (problem.identification), and label reconstructions as such.
  • Creation: the original syllabus transcribed in full, with a session-by-session schedule linking every problem page; scripts/gen_problem_index.py builds the problem index and its navigation block from page frontmatter (CI checks it is current).
  • Creation: figures for the problems under assets/images/problems/: diagrams drawn for this site (CC BY 4.0) and public-domain, CC0 or CC BY images from Wikimedia Commons, Project Gutenberg and the Library of Congress, each captioned with its source and licence.
  • Update: identifications draw on Winfree's own archived web pages (his 2001-02 "Adventures in Discovery" columns identify Rainbow Moon) and on the bookmark names inside his archived course handout, which point at a companion problem document that does not survive (for example, Paired Observations links to Keplers_Laws, LoShu to Tictactoe_LoShu).
  • Update: editorial rewrite of the home, section, GamesWorth and readings pages: parallel section structure (overview, sessions, key ideas, GamesWorth focus, readings, problems table), quotations checked against the syllabus, repeated boilerplate removed, lists that were folded into paragraphs fixed, and external links checked (access markers, years and addresses corrected where they were wrong).
  • Update: scripts/check_site.py fails the build when a list is folded into a paragraph.
  • Update: consistency pass across the home, section, readings, GamesWorth, syllabus and problem-index pages. Each problem now appears in exactly one section's problem table (Pedestrian Crosswalk Mystery under Section 3, Stacked Cantilevers Lab under Section 5; the sections where they begin still mention them). Problem names match each page's title everywhere, including the syllabus schedule's link text. The section navigation labels and the problem index use the full section titles. Every session now opens with a "Readings due" line, readings lists share one format and link their reading-list entries, and Ehrlich's chapter titles for sessions 16 to 18 were added (checked against Crossref).

  • Update: the syllabus transcription now keeps two lines exactly as printed: the "Spring break" line after session 17 and the final-exam line with its unfilled date. Quotations of the syllabus on problem pages were checked against the PDF, and an Internet Archive copy of Ehrlich's book is marked as available to print-disabled readers only.

  • Update: the header logo is now the University of New Mexico wordmark (assets/unm.png), replacing the University of Arizona logo, to match the favicon and the other UNM course sites. Winfree's course was taught at the University of Arizona; that credit stays in the page text.

  • Update: CI follows UNM-CARC/docs. .github/workflows/docs.yml has the same okf-conformance job (the reference OKF validator, shared with idss-mesa.github.io, plus the llms.txt drift check) and the same deploy job (Zensical build, agent surface, actions/deploy-pages). This site adds a problem-index drift check, a trial build on pull requests, --strict and check_site.py. The site now builds with Zensical, which reads mkdocs.yml; the root index.md no longer carries a license key, which the reference validator does not expect (the licence stays in the page badge and the JSON-LD).

2026-09-16

  • Initialization: made the site an Open Knowledge Format (OKF v0.2) bundle with the same agent surface as the AI Automation and Agents course site. Every content page now carries frontmatter (title, description, type, tags, status, generated, sources); the root index.md declares okf_version.
  • Creation: scripts/gen_llms_txt.py writes llms.txt (linked outline with Markdown-twin and raw-source addresses) and llms-full.txt (the whole corpus); scripts/postbuild_agent_surface.py mirrors every page's Markdown at its URL plus index.md, injects okf:* meta tags, Open Graph tags and schema.org JSON-LD, adds a Markdown button and a machine-readable line to every page, gives the 404 page recovery links, and writes robots.txt; scripts/okf_validate.py and scripts/check_site.py enforce the contract in CI.
  • Creation: the For AI agents page and this log, under About in the navigation; AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md at the repository root for coding agents.
  • Update: the GitHub Actions workflow now validates the bundle, builds with mkdocs build --strict, runs the post-build step and its checks, and deploys with actions/deploy-pages instead of mkdocs gh-deploy.
  • Update: corrected site_url and repo_url in mkdocs.yml to the tyson-swetnam account, enabled the Edit this page and View source buttons, removed the unused mkdocstrings and mkdocs-jupyter plugins and the missing chatbot widget references, and trimmed requirements.txt to the build dependencies.
  • Update: favicon changed to the University of New Mexico icon used by the AI Automation and Agents site (assets/unm.ico).

Machine-readable: this page as Markdown · raw source on GitHub · llms.txt · llms-full.txt (whole site). See For AI agents.