MU puzzle
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MU puzzle
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: MU puzzle
#2People who like this might also enjoy the similarly simple (yet unsolved) Collatz Conjecture:
Re: MU puzzle
#3This was my first introduction to formal language theory. Beautiful intro.
Re: MU puzzle
#4When I read about it in Gödel Escher Bach I wasn’t aware yet that unsolvable is a valid answer to a problem. I felt cheated(1) and the whole book lost a lot of its appeal.
In retrospect it may have actually undone some damage done by the school system where the solution space is usually very restricted.
Edit: (1) From what I remember it’s stated as find the sequence and not does such a sequence exist.
Re: MU puzzle
#5When I read about it in Gödel Escher Bach I wasn’t aware yet that unsolvable is a valid answer to a problem. I felt cheated(1) and the whole book lost a lot of its appeal. In retrospect it may have actually undone some damage done by the school system where the solution space is usually very restricted. Edit: (1) From what I remember it’s stated as find the sequence and not does such a sequence exist.
I would continue arguing that "unsolvable" is not a valid solution to this puzzle. If the description asks you to "find the solution" and the solution does not exist, then it is a riddle, not a puzzle.
Re: MU puzzle
#6When I read about it in Gödel Escher Bach I wasn’t aware yet that unsolvable is a valid answer to a problem. I felt cheated(1) and the whole book lost a lot of its appeal. In retrospect it may have actually undone some damage done by the school system where the solution space is usually very restricted. Edit: (1) From what I remember it’s stated as find the sequence and not does such a sequence exist.
I have a similar memory! I read about the problem in the book and worked on it for days, trying to solve it. I was in junior high at the time, and my math teacher spotted what I was doing. The teacher figured out quite quickly that it was impossible to solve. And I felt sort of dumb for not figuring out it was impossible and having a teacher prooving it :)
Re: MU puzzle
#7People who like this might also enjoy the similarly simple (yet unsolved) Collatz Conjecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture
On a slight tangent, I recently read a paper on an interesting relationship between Collatz path length and Mersenne primes.
"Our main finding to report is the fact that a path length of a Mersenne prime is approximately proportional to its index for large n, namely, D(Mn) ≈ 13.45n."
Paper is at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1104.2804.pdf . WARNING: PDF.
Re: MU puzzle
#8When I read about it in Gödel Escher Bach I wasn’t aware yet that unsolvable is a valid answer to a problem. I felt cheated(1) and the whole book lost a lot of its appeal. In retrospect it may have actually undone some damage done by the school system where the solution space is usually very restricted. Edit: (1) From what I remember it’s stated as find the sequence and not does such a sequence exist.
I always saw it as his way of teaching of grammars. But I think it is kind of bad that the grammar isn't actually creating a solvable system.
Re: MU puzzle
#9People who like this might also enjoy the similarly simple (yet unsolved) Collatz Conjecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture
On a slight tangent, I recently read a paper on an interesting relationship between Collatz path length and Mersenne primes. "Our main finding to report is the fact that a path length of a Mersenne prime is approximately proportional to its index for large n, namely, D(Mn) ≈ 13.45n." Paper is at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1104.2804.pdf . WARNING: PDF.
I'm curious, why do people on HN warn about PDFs? The worst things I can imagine happening with PDFs are (1) you don't have any software that can read it (probably like .2% of HNers?) and (2) it could potentially have some malware (but the same could be said of a website)
Re: MU puzzle
#10When I read about it in Gödel Escher Bach I wasn’t aware yet that unsolvable is a valid answer to a problem. I felt cheated(1) and the whole book lost a lot of its appeal. In retrospect it may have actually undone some damage done by the school system where the solution space is usually very restricted. Edit: (1) From what I remember it’s stated as find the sequence and not does such a sequence exist.
It's a book about incompleteness, undecidability and other nasty surprises in math. Nobody expected them. So an unexpected nasty surprise of an unsolvable problem is somehow relevant to the book.