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Hello, World

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Re: Hello, World

#61

Post by javert »

marvy wrote: post #55
javert wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. That makes him even worse. "Antitrust" is a bogus concept. It is never and was never in the public interest. It is also a massive violation of the rights of companies and their shareholders. Consider that if Windows/IE were really that bad, people would have just switched more readily to a Microsoft competitor. Desktop-quality Linux would have come about/come about sooner, or something equivalent. This is…

Ok, I've read it. I agree it is serious. But I think it's also wrong. Monopolies can be abused in ways that make it almost impossible to compete against them. Let's use Windows as an example. Some companies that sell Windows boxes also sell Linux boxes. (Dell for example.) Of course, the Linux boxes are less popular. But why not sell a computer that can dual boot? People would be a lot more willing to experiment with…

If Windows started sucking, people would switch. Demand would arise for a better alternative. In the long run, companies and consumers are not going to choose a significantly inferior product.

There are no specific examples that will get you out of this.

Actually, it Windows already kinda does suck, which is why so many people (even companies) use Apple. And there are lots of other alternative OSs.

Re: Hello, World

#62

Post by javert »

mappu wrote: post #54
javert wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. That makes him even worse. "Antitrust" is a bogus concept. It is never and was never in the public interest. It is also a massive violation of the rights of companies and their shareholders. Consider that if Windows/IE were really that bad, people would have just switched more readily to a Microsoft competitor. Desktop-quality Linux would have come about/come about sooner, or something equivalent. This is…

Most "free" markets don't have perfect competition, nor perfect information, nor rational actors. It's possible for Microsoft to provide a terrible service and for no better competitors to emerge. Consider last-mile telephone lines. It's wasteful to have ten companies each spend billions of dollars digging up the same roads to lay the same cables - and it's a nearly-impossible barrier to entry for new competitors. Su…

There's an easy solution to the last-mile problem, which is for communities to own the infrastructure and operate it as a non-profit.

Believe me, people would do that if they were getting sufficiently screwed by telcos and if it were legal.

Actually, the former condition is already satisfied, but the latter is (basically) not.

Though there have been lots of municipal broadband efforts, which is a point in my favor, here. The telcos fight them tooth and nail using the legal system.

That is just another example of a legal monopoly (as opposed to a natural monopoly---no such thing).

Re: Hello, World

#63

Post by indians_pro »

javert wrote: post #51
hkmurakami wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you have no respect for a researcher who took rhe stand against Microsoft in the Microsoft antitrust case?

Absolutely. That makes him even worse. "Antitrust" is a bogus concept. It is never and was never in the public interest. It is also a massive violation of the rights of companies and their shareholders. Consider that if Windows/IE were really that bad, people would have just switched more readily to a Microsoft competitor. Desktop-quality Linux would have come about/come about sooner, or something equivalent. This is…

Thank you for your comment. It shows a lot of insight and has given me a few things to think about.

Re: Hello, World

#64

Post by zem »

furyofantares wrote: post #5
SMackinnon wrote: post #3

Spoiler: Bob always chooses the same as his flip, Alice always chooses the opposite of her flip. B A H H - Bob chooses heads, Win H T - Alice chooses heads, Win T H - Alice chooses tails, Win T T - Bob chooses tails, Win

My experience arriving at this solution made me a bit curious as to how others solved it. Was there reasoning involved before you arrived at a strategy and verified it, or did the strategy just come to you? Did you try multiple strategies, and if so, was there a method to generating/iterating on them, or were they just coming to you and you tried them?

i did it by thinking "let bob pick a strategy, and let alice pick her answer by knowing what bob is going to do. if bob always guesses his own coin, then when alice sees H she knows that either bob has H too and will therefore win for both of them, or bob has T and will therefore lose, but the only way to lose is if bob has T so if alice guesses T then they have all their bases covered". of course there is a simpler way to get the answer, as other posters have noted.

Re: Hello, World

#66

Post by pliny »

javert wrote: post #61
marvy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I've read it. I agree it is serious. But I think it's also wrong. Monopolies can be abused in ways that make it almost impossible to compete against them. Let's use Windows as an example. Some companies that sell Windows boxes also sell Linux boxes. (Dell for example.) Of course, the Linux boxes are less popular. But why not sell a computer that can dual boot? People would be a lot more willing to experiment with…

If Windows started sucking, people would switch. Demand would arise for a better alternative. In the long run, companies and consumers are not going to choose a significantly inferior product. There are no specific examples that will get you out of this. Actually, it Windows already kinda does suck, which is why so many people (even companies) use Apple. And there are lots of other alternative OSs.

>There are no specific examples that will get you out of this.

So you're saying that no amount of evidence to the contrary will change your mind?

Re: Hello, World

#67

Post by imdsm »

yukinon wrote: post #39
ColinDabritz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helped me to think of it this way: Alice is guessing that their coins are different (one possibility) and Bob is guessing that their coins are the same (the other possibility), so from either direction they are covered.

Thanks. I think this was the reply that actually helped me understand this.

Yeah it still took a minute. The way I realised it was Bob is covering them for the same flips, so if he flips H, he covers if Alice flips a H too. But if she flips a T, Bob is no longer covering her, but she knows when Bob isn't covering her, if she guesses for the opposite, she'll cover them. 100%.

The next level is: Eve joins the game, and the coin gets another side.

Re: Hello, World

#68

Post by simplicio »

furyofantares wrote: post #5
SMackinnon wrote: post #3

Spoiler: Bob always chooses the same as his flip, Alice always chooses the opposite of her flip. B A H H - Bob chooses heads, Win H T - Alice chooses heads, Win T H - Alice chooses tails, Win T T - Bob chooses tails, Win

My experience arriving at this solution made me a bit curious as to how others solved it. Was there reasoning involved before you arrived at a strategy and verified it, or did the strategy just come to you? Did you try multiple strategies, and if so, was there a method to generating/iterating on them, or were they just coming to you and you tried them?

Brainteasers tend to follow a particular pattern. The amount of information the various Alices and Bobs and Charlies have seems at first glance to obviously be inadequate to the task they're given. Then a closer examination reveals that there's some sublte extra scrap of information, and you can generally assume than that the answer is to use that to trace out the possibilities to find the actual answer.

So knowing that, I just looked for what extra, non-obvious piece of information A and B had. It seems impossible to guess what the results of a coin-flip are in another room. But the players also know the result of their own flip, and so basing a strategy on that extra info is certainly going to be the answer. From there, since there are so few combinations of such a strategy, getting the right answer is pretty trivial.

I like this brain teaser (and I suspect the reason that Felton likes it as well) because it shows this general pattern for brain teasers very clearly. The "extra" piece of information is pretty obvious with a moments thought. And once you have it, the number of possible strategies using it is small enough that you can see the correct one quickly.

A lot of other brain teasers require a lot of pen and paper work even after you've guessed the "trick" in order to work through all the possiblities. So this is sort of a nice, boiled down "essence du brainteaser".

Re: Hello, World

#69

Post by praptak »

rjtobin wrote: post #13

Some discrete mathematicians are interested in this sort of problem, which they call "simultaneous hat guessing". There are quite a few papers, in case anyone is interested and unfamiliar with this sort of thing. Another fun problem, probably better known, is sequential hat guessing: take 100 people in a line, arranged so that each person can see everyone in front of them, but no-one can see any of the people behind…

An actual fun problem:

100 prisoners are each assigned a black or white hat, at random. As always, they cannot communicate after the hats are assigned. Then they are shown each other. None sees own hat, everyone sees everyone elses hat. Then they are led into separate rooms and each guesses their own hat color.

They win only if everybody guesses correctly. What strategy maximizes the probability of that event?

Re: Hello, World

#70

Post by pelario »

"Coding is exciting: you can decide what is supposed to happen, and the computer will do it…the only limit is your skill and imagination!"

Someone didn't learn about the halting problem :-)

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