Some problems become easier when I'm sleepy because I can't think as clearly but I start to focus very well.
Other problems demand several passes of experimentation. For those it's easier to try a quick test during the day, think about it while doing other things, and then wake up with the (possible) solution the next day.
I happened to run into this in the bookstore today. I don't recall it making any waves online, but it's a fun read and uses a lot of real-world concepts. Definitely worth checking out.
If you hate having redundant types, I highly recommend using haXe. It has type inference by first-usage so in most cases you don't need to specify any type. If you want to get around the type system it has untyped{} code blocks, casts, and the "Dynamic" type, all of which throw type safety over to the runtime interpreter.
This is not a new article by any means, but it's a good overview of the kinds of approaches one might take in collision.
One of the directors at my workplace has the motto "Collision is gameplay" because of the high importance of getting these dynamics right -- whether you allow things to interpenetrate or not, how general the allowed shapes are, etc. The algorithms can get complex very quickly if you let them, and sometimes an accurate and realistic physical simulation turns out to be the wrong thing.
You have the "second move" in this chess game of monopolistic competition. Even highly successful, technically superior, first-to-market products have been beaten out by competitors.
The "Even Dirtier Secret", HN edition: devs who can't type, don't read books, can't understand LtU or git or BDD, get all their info from Stackoverflow. Oh, yeah, they're not in the top 99.999999%, so now way Joel will hire them.
"You'd be absolutely astonishedly flabbergasted at how many programmers don't know how to READ. I'm dead serious. You can learn to speed read even faster than you can learn to type, and yet there are tons of programmers out there who are unable to even skim this blog. They try, but unlike speed readers, these folks don't actually pick up the content."
AAA games as we know them will peak and then decline. The PC is inexorably moving towards a fully open-standard platform on which DRM-laden products cannot work. Consoles don't suffer the same problem, but by cutting themselves off from an open world and locking the hardware specs at a fixed low level, they force development costs considerably higher. The Wii points to a future console market that seeks disruptive hardware innovations over a market-share battle, but development costs mean that third parties will have few incentives to participate in such a market.
Also, games with a large engineering scope have an astonishingly poor track record. Games with a high content scope are much more likely to succeed.
Other problems demand several passes of experimentation. For those it's easier to try a quick test during the day, think about it while doing other things, and then wake up with the (possible) solution the next day.