Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Square Theory

aaronson.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 144 posts

Re: Square Theory

#111

Post by dyauspitr »

j2kun wrote: post #43
joshhug wrote: post #16

The part about dad joke square theory got me thinking about this classic scarecrow joke, which feels like an example from some higher order version of square theory: "Why was the scarecrow given an award?" "He was out standing in his field." The fact that a scarecrow's job is to be "out standing in his field", and that excelling at one's job can be phrased as being "outstanding in his field" is an incredible linguist…

The classic, "why did the chicken cross the road" also fits into this genre, but nobody seems to understand that "get to the other side" means "to cross over from life to death." Every time I explain this to someone they are shocked that they never knew this meaning.

Seems arbitrary. Why does “get to the other side” mean to cross over from life to death. You’re saying it like it’s obvious.

Re: Square Theory

#112

Post by KolibriFly »

oliwary wrote: post #9

> If you’ve ever tried to construct a crossword, you’ll find that the framing of a crossword grid under square theory feels right. When you’re nearing the end of the grid-filling process, finding valid crossings of words to fill that final corner of a grid, there’s a satisfying “clicking” feeling—a sense of magic—when it all fits together, analogous to the wrapping-around feeling of completing the square. If you enjo…

Oh wow, Spaceword is hitting that exact same brain-itch as square theory

Re: Square Theory

#113

Post by vanderZwan »

> But here’s what I think makes squares special: a square is the simplest polygon that has non-adjacent sides. In a triangle, each side is adjacent to the other two sides. But in a square, opposite sides have no points in common, which makes any connection between them feel surprising, like a coincidence. In pentagons and beyond, this still holds, but the extra sides add complexity that make them feel slightly less elegant. Nevertheless, other shapes can be interesting too, but I see them as the exception, not the rule.

I bet that you could fit the "clever bits" of writing of quite a few literary classics into more complex shapes. Especially when it's the ons that only people who really like literary classics like. Like, say, a story with five main characters who all turn out to be connected in one way like how one might create a five-pointed star with one piece of string and five push-pins, and in a completely different unrelated way like a pentagon made by the same arrangement of push-pins.

Re: Square Theory

#114

Post by sings »

staffordrj wrote: post #83
jacobolus wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know the most common name is "hink pink", if anyone wants to look this up (or sometimes "hinky pinky"). Here's a 1981 book, https://archive.org/details/hinkpinkbookorwh00burn/ and here's a short description from the 50s, https://archive.org/details/realbookofgames0000unse/page/134... Searching further, apparently Hink Pink was the name of an 18th century pirate ship; I'm not sure if there's a relation to…

I made a daily game version of this https://rystaf.github.io/hinklepinkle/

Love the idea but today’s was not a good one.

Re: Square Theory

#115

Post by vanderZwan »

wttdotm wrote: post #104
varjag wrote: post #27

Leibnitz once famously said, "Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting". Perhaps solving crosswords is the pleasure mind experiences from doing group theory.

In "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat," there's a chapter where Oliver Sacks makes a similar argument about music stemming from the case of two autistic twins who couldn't do arithmetic but played a game with each other where they named increasingly large primes. Basically says that music/harmony is a kind of innate appreciation of the numerical relationship between sounds, much like naming primes is an apprecia…

I've read that music and dancing memory is mainly handled in the cerebellum, which is separate from many other types of memory. This is also theorized to mostly explain why playing familiar music can help "stabilize" people with dementia who otherwise feel lost (funny enough also something Sacks has talked about[0]), because the cerebellum is typically less affected than the neocortex by whatever process is causing the brain to break down.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HLEr-zP3fc

Re: Square Theory

#117

Post by idk1 »

This feels a little over blown, but on the other hand, you've got to have an angle and I think this is the right angle.

Re: Square Theory

#118

Post by oliwary »

JoshuaDavid wrote: post #77
oliwary wrote: post #9

> If you’ve ever tried to construct a crossword, you’ll find that the framing of a crossword grid under square theory feels right. When you’re nearing the end of the grid-filling process, finding valid crossings of words to fill that final corner of a grid, there’s a satisfying “clicking” feeling—a sense of magic—when it all fits together, analogous to the wrapping-around feeling of completing the square. If you enjo…

Fun game! Though I dispute that people are "very close" to achieving a perfect pattern. To get a "perfect" pattern you'd need to find three 7 letter words that can stack on rows adjacent to each other to form a 3 letter word in each column. Such arrangements do exist, for example: o p e r a t e a r r o w e d r e s e n d s but they are very rare - I estimate something on the order of 0.002% of combinations of three 7-…

Glad you like it! :) And thank you for your comments, super interesting! Excellent point about the rarity of the perfect arrangement. Perhaps I should throw in a few lettersets that do have a solution, I am intrigued to see if people would discover it.

My other game, https://squareword.org focuses exclusively on perfect 5x5 squares, but here the goal is to uncover it wordle-style rather than arranging it from scratch. There are surprisingly few combinations that have ten unique, common words in a 5x5 letter square!

Re: Square Theory

#119

Post by Aachen »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #82
simianparrot wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason this old saying popped into my head reading that. I know it's not related but: Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

"Fruit flies like a banana" is arguably the quintessential example of ambiguity in English grammar. It shows that the grammatical structure of a sentence (which words are nouns, which are verbs, etc.) cannot be reliably recovered even if we know the meaning and possible grammatical categories of every word. Both ways to parse it are grammatically sound: (Fruit) (flies) (like a banana) (Fruit flies) (like) (a banana)…

Would marking compound words resolve this? As in germanic togetherwriting of things that form one whole, as in English' noun-that-they-modify-preceding adjectives, or as in some other language: some way of signaling this?

Re: Square Theory

#120

Post by Aachen »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #7
keeganpoppen wrote: post #4

what a lovely Baader-Meinhof for Ricki Heicklen's delightful "Unparalleled Misalignments", which showed up on HN not too long ago!

> what a lovely Baader-Meinhof Which attractive terrorists?

It's a cryptographic mechanism that allows you to see what was there in plain sight the whole time. Merkle-Dåmgard, Diffie-Hellman, cryptographic mechanisms are often named like this
Post reply on HN