Viewing profile — supernewton

Dan and Lisa's answers agree on all but problems 6 and 9, and Dan got two more correct than Lisa. So Dan is correct on both 6 and 9. Therefore, Mary is incorrect on 6 and 9. So she…

Your body actually produces a small amount of cyanide endogenously, if it makes you feel any better. It has some role in cell signalling.

Note that being able to do this would imply P=NP.

I feel like https://xkcd.com/221/ might be heavily influencing what the typical "random" die roll looks like on the internet ;)

The thing you're missing is that at no point is it assumed that there are exactly two elements in a boolean algebra. In fact you can have a boolean algebra with four elements (see …

Wizards of the Coast's in-house card database (Gatherer) is basically not maintained at all. I think they're very happy there is a third party willing to do that for free, and for …

It is not. a and b are not symmetric in this equation, you can't just swap them.

You know he's been responding directly on Scott Aaronson's blog, right?

This is covered by the article. A board game might take 4 people and 2 hours to play. If your three friends didn't have fun with a board game the first time, they probably won't wa…

An American's life expectancy when they're born is around 76. But the life expectancy among Americans that have already lived to the age of 65 is more like 83.

The conjecture is true for all small graphs that they tried, so if it's "obviously" false to you then something went wrong with your intuition somewhere.

The third sentence is "If the kid searched specifically for the video and found it, TikTok would have been safe."

For air transport in the U.S., it's not just one certificate, it's many. You get your private license, instrument rating, multi-engine rating, commercial certificate, instructor ce…

Sure, but in practice there don't really seem to exist "natural" problems that are both in P and are worse than O(n^3) or so. By "natural" I mean a problem that one would actually …

You don't get to have "hidden information". The code used to respond "yes" or "no" to the guess would be part of the problem input. But, we currently can't prove there doesn't exis…

Ambiguous parses aren't even the worst of it -- the worst are the ones that require real world knowledge. "I couldn't fit the trophy in my suitcase because it was too big." "I coul…

Similarly, Vatican City has slightly less than 6 popes per square mile.

Anecdotally, with practice, some people can flip a coin to a desired outcome like 65% of the time. And .65^20 is only around 1 in 10,000.

They're the feeder contests in the U.S. that determine who gets to represent the U.S. in the IMO. AMC = multiple choice test, open to all grade school students. AIME = open respons…

Laypeople use "exponential" to mean "superlinear". It's fine, probably.

The U.S. has legislation limiting consumer liability of credit card fraud to $50, and many cards will further waive that to $0. It's just simply not the consumer's problem if someo…

There are obviously commonsense exceptions granted. Also, you can fulfill the swim requirement by taking 1 beginner swim class regardless of whether you actually learn to swim duri…

There's another problem, the original one that quantum computers were conceived to solve: Simulating a quantum system.

> If a and b are the golden ratio and its conjugate, then f_n = a^n + b^n. But since |b| Well, almost. You need to multiply by a factor of 1/sqrt(5) before rounding.