Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
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Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
1–10 of 86 posts
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#2I did really well in school, and am a professional developer now, and my wife utterly destroys me at this game.
She can find sets in real time as the cards are being dealt, while singing along with music, it's maddening.
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#3> The paper soon set off a cascade of what Ellenberg called “math at Internet speed.” Within 10 days, Ellenberg and Dion Gijswijt, a mathematician at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, had each independently posted papers showing how to modify the argument to polish off the original cap set problem in just three pages.
This is a very interesting trend I've noticed. I wanted to cite a few papers on arXiv in one of my own research papers recently, but my advisor commented that none of the articles had been peer reviewed (since arXiv is a preprint server). I told him that in the last year alone, six papers on arXiv follow a "research trail" (i.e. a paper is put on arXiv in May that builds on results from a February paper that builds on results from December, etc.), and that the most recent peer-reviewed article in a published journal is so far behind the state-of-the-art that completing my paper without any mention to the arXiv works would put me significantly behind the rest of the field.
Of course, these papers all relate to math and computer science — whether a new algorithm or proof works is (usually) immediately evident upon implementation, and the papers on arXiv include the complete algorithm and often link to the author's code. Peer-reviewing their work yourself often takes no longer than a half hour or so (unlike, say, a research article in materials science, where a complete replication study could take over a year).
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#4I did really well in school, and am a professional developer now, and my wife utterly destroys me at this game. She can find sets in real time as the cards are being dealt, while singing along with music, it's maddening.
there are many forms of intelligence!
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#5For those who check the comments first: Not clickbait. Title is literally accurate.
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#6I did really well in school, and am a professional developer now, and my wife utterly destroys me at this game. She can find sets in real time as the cards are being dealt, while singing along with music, it's maddening.
Our friend is so jarringly good at Set and Scrabble that nobody will play with her anymore. She has to play people on the internet and they frequently disconnect mid-match.
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#7Wonderful piece; what I like is that I remember this game being taught to me by the mathematics professors at my school, and I enjoyed the game but didn't ask any deeper questions about the game, such as its mathematical properties. Now here I see this way of looking at the game, perhaps even the reason for its existence, and it's like rediscovering an old friend.
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#8> The paper soon set off a cascade of what Ellenberg called “math at Internet speed.” Within 10 days, Ellenberg and Dion Gijswijt, a mathematician at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, had each independently posted papers showing how to modify the argument to polish off the original cap set problem in just three pages. This is a very interesting trend I've noticed. I wanted to cite a few papers on arX…
That has been common in physics for a long time, too. For hot new topics, the conversations are often happening through preprints rather than peer-reviewed articles. (The papers are usually eventually published in peer-reviewed journals, though.)
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#9I did really well in school, and am a professional developer now, and my wife utterly destroys me at this game. She can find sets in real time as the cards are being dealt, while singing along with music, it's maddening.
Could it be somehow related to better peripheral vision?
I met a woman once who could gather four-leaf clovers nearly instantly, at the same spot where me and my male friends had spent minutes searching.
I've seen written in some places (but could not find a worthy source) that women might have better peripheral vision due to food gathering in prehistoric times, but this might just be some old sexist construct (if anyone knows a good source to confirm or refute this, please tell me).
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#10For those who check the comments first: Not clickbait. Title is literally accurate.
I wouldn't say it literally stunned anyone, but it's certainly a very (figuratively) impressive result.