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Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

#31

Post by schoen »

throwaway676565 wrote: post #27
abritinthebay wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If the inverse was true then entire fields of Mathematics would have collapsed. Honest question: what would've been the consequences of this?

Maybe this is more true for research that assumes the truth of the Riemann Hypothesis than research that assumed the truth of Fermat's Last Theorem?

Maybe there was some significant body of research before 1995 that assumed the Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture, a more powerful statement that implied Fermat's Last Theorem and was ultimately proven as a way of proving it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_theorem

Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

#32

Post by jackhack »

pnut wrote: post #2

I 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.

Synesthesia? Perhaps her brain sees those sets and identifies them in such a way that it takes no conscious effort? A group might appear in a different color, or "taste" or feeling, for example...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

#33

Post by Nadya »

hinkley wrote: post #6
pnut wrote: post #2

I 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.

If you want to lose friends and be disowned from your family - learn to play Monopoly by the actual rules and follow this strategy: http://imgur.com/a/vX3zm

I can confirm that it works and nobody wants to play Monopoly anymore. Instead we play more fun board games

Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

#34

Post by schoen »

tgb wrote: post #28
joe_the_user wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a grad student in math I read a lot of lifeless papers. Seeing the exact opposite is fun. I thought it was a good article. Why does math need to avoid breathlessness if we seem to embrace it with, say, a million breathless articles about Stephen Curry's latest game? It only seems bad because there's not a culture of excitement over math like there is for basketball, so it stands out. But if we want there to be suc…

Martin Gardner was very good at that, and I think Erica Klarreich (one of the main Quanta math journalists and the author of this particular article) is good at it too: she likes to focus on the history and context of a problem, describing mathematicians' expectations and hopes for a solution, and then how progress was made and what consequences it may have.

I guess there's some risk that many of these stories fall into similar patterns (something was hard and mathematicians worked on it for a long time, they didn't expect it to be solved soon, now it's been solved solved and people are impressed and see various applications), but it's nice to see the details and hear from some people in the field in their own words.

I feel like Klarreich tends to give more details than Gardner did when writing about current research; maybe that partly has to do with the web form, because she can include links to the actual papers and supplementary materials. It's also a nice counterpoint to the enthusiasm that her articles convey because the applications and consequences are specific; it's not like journalism that says "maybe now we'll get a pony/interstellar spaceflight/spooky quantum communications/faster computers!" without really showing how the discovery is going to enable that.

The fact is that mathematicians are excited by unexpected progress in math research, so hopefully other people can be too! :-)

Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

#35

Post by zem »

henrik_w wrote: post #12

Nice 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…

the similar but easier game "spot it!" works better for playing with kids, i find. (i prefer it as an adult too - i thought i'd love set, but playing it feels more like work than fun to me.)

Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

#39

Post by mundo »

dhekir wrote: post #9
pnut wrote: post #2

I 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…

Funny anecdata: in my circle of friends, the trait that best predicts Set skill isn't IQ or gender or anything like that, it's musical ability.

This came up at a party. Six people playing Set, all of us from different cities, and the three that took band in high school utterly dominated the three that didn't. The reason? Field trips. The Band kids had all played Set for hours on buses, the rest of us had only played it once or twice and lost interest.

Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

#40

Post by jerf »

x1798DE wrote: post #29
jerf wrote: post #5

For those who check the comments first: Not clickbait. Title is literally accurate.

Even if mathematicians were literally or figuratively stunned by the headline, it's a clickbait headline because it gives you no information about the content of the article, while trying to entice you to click through and read it with a big claim. Example: Clickbait headline: "This underdog just won a major political office!" Regular headline: "Truman defeats Dewey"

If you think about it, you'll realize that in order to phrase my post that way in the first place, I must already have thought that the headline was written in the form of clickbait, otherwise it makes no sense.
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