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Hello, World

m.whitehouse.gov

21–30 of 121 posts

Re: Hello, World

#21
post #15
post #10

This is off topic, but when the next president takes office, all of current whitehouse.gov content will be gone and replaced, no?

I'm guessing they will do something similar to when Obama took office: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/

Very clever. So I'm assuming they just don't write any links that involve using the full domain. (i.e. /somepage instead of http://www.whitehouse.gov/somepage)

Re: Hello, World

#22

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

And to show how to logically work out this answer (same spoiler warning applies):

I started with a truth table as well. It's pretty easy to show that if Alice (or without loss of generality Bob) uses a fixed "always guess H" or "always guess T" strategy, that wins in two cases, but in the other two cases Bob has no way to reliably win. For instance, if Alice always guesses H, then two cases become wins:

    A B
    H H W
    H T ?
    T H W
    T T ?
But in the other two cases, Bob has the same T each time, so he doesn't have enough information to distinguish those cases, and thus he can't reliably guess correctly.

So Alice needs to use a strategy that depends on her flip. There are only two such strategies that don't trivially reduce to a constant guess: guess what you flip or guess the opposite of what you flip. Going with the former, where Alice guesses what she flips:

    A B
    H H W
    H T ?
    T H ?
    T T W
From this, clearly if Bob guesses the opposite of what he flips, someone wins in all four cases.

The only other solution is to reverse the two: Alice guesses the opposite of what she flips, and Bob guesses what he flips.

This seems like a nice warm-up for other protocols that depend on agreed-upon strategy but not a secure channel for direct communication, such as Diffie Hellman or the Socialist Millionare Problem.

Re: Hello, World

#26
post #24

It seems too simple to be right, but can Bob just say heads all the time, and Alice say tails all the time?

No, there are two different coins. So if Bob flipped heads (which Alice guessed tails for) then they lose.

Re: Hello, World

#27

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

however, if the puzzle is changed from 'either one or both their guesses are correct they win' to 'both their guesses should be correct to win', then the solution becomes tough!

Re: Hello, World

#29
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…

The solution requires infinite memory (not just arbitrary finite memory, but an actual, non-compressible infinite value) which is of course impossible in reality.

Usually problems on "countable" structures need only finite memory (to process infinite streaming input), so this problem is rather misleading.

Re: Hello, World

#30
post #21
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing they will do something similar to when Obama took office: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/

Very clever. So I'm assuming they just don't write any links that involve using the full domain. (i.e. /somepage instead of http://www.whitehouse.gov/somepage )

Link rewriting is a standard feature of wget.
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