iOS app of the referenced game: https://appsto.re/us/EXmoU.i
Physical version of the game is available, I suggest adding it to your collection.
Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
11–20 of 86 posts
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#12Nice to read about mathematics that involves Set! I found out about Set here on Hacker News several years ago, when I read Peter Norvig's blog post on the odds of not finding a set in the 12 cards [1]. I had never heard about the game before, but tried it and really liked it.
The simplicity of the rules, the mathematical nature of it, and the fact that adults and kinds can play together makes it such a great game. I continued with the analysis of finding the odds of not set in each round of play, and had fun doing so. It seems very difficult to find an analytical solution (and quite beyond me), but simulation was a nice project that gave some good insights into how the odds vary over the rounds played [2].
[1] http://norvig.com/SET.html
[2] https://henrikwarne.com/2011/09/30/set-probabilities-revisit...
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#13> 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.)
Building on research seems like it's a form of peer review, especially in math where you'd need to understand the entire proof before making incremental improvements to it.
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#14For 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.
According to Google, the average human male foot is 26.3 cm, or 0.86 feet. So I suppose I am literally 7 feet fall.
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
Building on research seems like it's a form of peer review, especially in math where you'd need to understand the entire proof before making incremental improvements to it.
While this can be true it's also common to have "assuming X is true" where X is some very complicated hypothesis.
We saw this with Fermat's Last Theorem and it was with a great sigh of relief that it was finally proven in the 90s. If the inverse was true then entire fields of Mathematics would have collapsed.
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#16I 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!
Reminds me of Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#17I 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 an…
I don't know if that's a male/female trait. I literally find four leaf clovers so often/fast that I don't even consciousnessly know how I do it. I'll just reach down and grab them.
I'm a male btw
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#18I 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.
> and they frequently disconnect mid-match.
Speaking solely of scrabble, this happens pretty often regardless of skill level. ;-) I try to keep 3 games going at a time, but my last 5 have quit in the first three turns! And I'm using a matchmaking algorithm, so they're players of my approximate skill level too!
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#19For those who check the comments first: Not clickbait. Title is literally accurate.
Oh come on,
The title and the article seem to be essentially accurate but are written in a breathless "we'll make this math stuff exciting, darn it" tone that some might like but which, as a math person, I find somewhat grating.
I think science/math writing of twenty or forty years ago was still reasonably effective and with that, we could get-by with a headline such as "A impressive result in the combinatorics field that uses the 'polynomial method'"
Edit: I appreciate that quantamagazine.org is doing a bunch of math articles. But we gotta admit it's injecting about every bit of "this is simply amaaaazing" rhetoric it can muster, which detracts somewhat from at least my enjoyment of it and actually it a harder to figure what's happening (from MA-level perspective).
Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians
#20I 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.
Sounds like she would be an amazing NFL QB if she can also throw a football :)