Viewing profile — possiblywrong

The article deserves several clarifications: > The deck has to be cut more or less in half before shuffling. "More or less" is doing some heavy lifting here. The original GSR shuff…

Following is the closed form solution linked in the article (from a since-deleted Reddit comment): from functools import reduce def recurrence(ops, a0, n): def transform(x, op): re…

It's interesting that the two forward versions of the algorithm were added to Wikipedia just a few months ago. (The OP article is from 2020.)

> Second, the least significant bits that come from this generator are biased. I don't think this is true; I'm guessing that the author borrowed this observation from one of the va…

You are correct. The first example time in the article, "2024-12-25 at 18:54:53 UTC", corresponds to POSIX timestamp 1735152893, not 1735152686. And there have been 27 leap seconds…

Author of the linked article here; you're right that just the expected number of guesses is roughly monotonic. However, that expected number of guesses (along with Ballmer's expect…

> Note that if F(x,y)=0, then the point (x,y) is exactly on the circle. If F(x,y)>0, then the point is outside of the circle, and if F(x,y) In other words, given any point (x,y), F…

There was some amount of "standardization" of checksum methods to help with debugging typos. For example, Nibble magazine used a couple of programs-- the one I remember using was K…

Author of the linked article here; re marking movement of shadows, I wrote a follow-up that discusses some alternatives, mainly that one: https://possiblywrong.wordpress.com/2014/0…

> You don't need to manually count, just make sure all the circles are the correct colors. I guess this takes me a while, and seems significantly more error-prone to me than the co…

Author of the article here; I suppose I should confess that I did consider automating the counting, which did seem like an interesting problem... but I rejected the idea, for what …

Author of the article here; you have a point that there is no explicit discussion of validating this assumption, beyond the variability shown in the colored curves in the "count pe…

Author of the article here-- right! This was the key "real world" motivation for this experiment as an attempt at a pedagogical tool; from the article: > As an aside, I think the f…

Author of the article here; this is a great point. This experiment initially stemmed from a nice analytical solution to the problem of computing the expected value (via generating …

> "For these reasons, I'm actually a bit surprised that the author's data matches the theory so closely... The fit is so perfect I actually suspect he... ah... played with his data…