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Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

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Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

#41

Post by oh_sigh »

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…

My girlfriend is amazing at finding 4 leaf clovers, but I destroy her in Set...so they may not be related skills

Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

#42

Post by pmichaud »

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.

My wife also is amazing at this game and destroys me every time :)

Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

#43

Post by [deleted] »

jackhack wrote: post #32
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

[deleted]

Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

#44

Post by schoen »

OJFord wrote: post #36

> a different design with four attributes — color (which can be red, purple or green), Was this game invented to annoy the colour-blind?

It was invented based on the file-marking symbols used by a geneticist for genetics research:

http://www.setgame.com/founder-inventor

https://web.archive.org/web/20130313190253/http://www.setgam...

You can play a variant of Set in a single color (which the rules suggest is easier -- but it's also more feasible for color-blind players).

Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

#46

Post by natdempk »

cwmoo740 wrote: post #30
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.

My family is ultra-competitive and this used to be one of our go to games until my sister mastered it. My brother-in-law wrote an android game to help her practice and after about a month she was down to sub 1 minute clears. We had to give up the game after that.

Is the android app available for download anywhere?

Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

#47

Post by btilly »

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?

The consequence is that a whole body of work winds up coming with an asterisk until people figure out what they can and can't trust. Papers may be looked at for inspiration, but won't be quoted for results. Eventually some of it gets proved properly, and the rest is abandoned. After that the older papers become mere historical curiosities.

A reasonably recent example of this is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_school_of_algebraic_ge....

A possible place where this could happen is the classification of finite groups. It has been "proven", but the proof is long, technical, and never was adequately reviewed. Lots of papers these days start off using the classification in interesting ways. However there is an open program to produce an actual reviewed proof. If in the process of doing that, we found that the original result was long, there would be a fairly large project to figure out the consequences.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_finite_simpl... for more.

Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

#49

Post by sdenton4 »

guelo wrote: post #26
Xcelerate wrote: post #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 arX…

I'm not familiar with academia but I was surprised that the discovery was made by three mathematicians at three different far flung universities. Is that type of collaboration also being accelerated by the internet?

Collaborators will often meet at conferences or similar, and then go out of their way to attend the same conferences. There's a big difference between the fast in person work that lays the ground work, and the refinement that goes into finishing the paper. The internet is way more useful for the latter, imho. It's much easier to share ideas quickly on a black board...

Re: Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians

#50

Post by function_seven »

mundo wrote: post #39
dhekir wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I like how you introduce a correlating attribute in the beginning of your comment, get me thinking about the relationship between musical ability and set-identifying ability, then clobber whatever hypothesis I was putting together just as fast with the confounding "field trips" variable.

Nice work :)

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