OscarCunningham

8 ms·

1.
by OscarCunningham 17d ago
The one they give also crosses numerous rivers and lakes. For the strict version of the challenge where you literally can't cross water it's likely that the best solution is across Antarctica. Guaranteed by temperature to contain
2.
by OscarCunningham 17d ago
There's a longer land path that starts in or near Senegal and ends in China. But they miss it because it goes near the Dead Sea, and they treat anything below sea level as water.
3.
by OscarCunningham 19d ago
It's also robust to errors in the mesh. Like if the triangles don't quite join up it still gives a reasonable answer. https://mathstodon.xyz/@keenancrane/109388206643166726
4.
by OscarCunningham 1mo ago
You could maybe determine this using a SAT solver. You would have to encode the entire QR code specification. I was thinking of doing this to find a minimalist QR code that just had as few black cells as possible.
5.
by OscarCunningham 1mo ago
https://pony.social/@luna/115057532794342459
6.
by OscarCunningham 1mo ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/ublxt...
7.
by OscarCunningham 1mo ago
By the same author: https://mathstodon.xyz/@andrewt/115056697540191327
8.
by OscarCunningham 2mo ago
I think you're in the wrong thread. This one is about Claude producing counterexamples. The Go thread is next door.
9.
by OscarCunningham 2mo ago
I wouldn't have expected that there was post training specifically on the issue of looking for proofs vs counter examples. But it might be that other post training has a side effect of making AIs better at looking for counter examples.
10.
by OscarCunningham 2mo ago
They're trained on human data. I would expect them to emulate human biases as closely as possible.
11.
by OscarCunningham 3mo ago
The AI understands context so it's able to spot typos even when they coincidentally make reel words.
12.
by OscarCunningham 3mo ago
One argument would be that Ozempic doesn't give your body any additional resources. It just triggers your body to behave in a different way. But if the changes it causes are universally good, why didn't evolution already make your
13.
by OscarCunningham 4mo ago
John D Cook gives more technical details here: "Trying to fit a logistic curve" https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/12/20/fit-logistic-curve...
14.
by OscarCunningham 6mo ago
I've been wondering if you could do a similar thing for a Droste effect image containing two copies of itself. Packs of Laughing Cow cheese show a cow with two earrings, each of which is a pack of the cheese.
15.
by OscarCunningham 6mo ago
Oh I get it, the onion is made of Swiss cheese.
16.
by OscarCunningham 6mo ago
It seems like a lot of the difficulty is in finding arrangements that satisfy constraints. I wonder if an alternative approach would be to use a SAT solver. I suppose the problem with that approach would be that the solver might always find
17.
by OscarCunningham 7mo ago
This is a deliberate choice by Congress to give the Fed a mandate to target 2% inflation. In particular Congress hasn't given them any instruction to try to make up for mistakes. If inflation overshoots in one year then they don't
18.
by OscarCunningham 7mo ago
Does this mean that if Earth stays a fixed distance from the sun then its equilibrium temperature is fixed? I remember people saying things like that the albedo of the ice caps affected the Earth's temperature.
19.
by OscarCunningham 8mo ago
Is it known which algorithms produce 'difficult' mazes? I'm imagining you could run all the maze solving algorithms against all the maze generating algorithms many times, and then calculate what the Nash equilibrium would be
20.
by OscarCunningham 8mo ago
Enclosing a settlement gets easier as it gets larger. The amount of work is proportional to the perimeter, while the number of people to do the work is proportional to the area. The area is proportional to the square of the perimeter, so th
21.
by OscarCunningham 8mo ago
Another example: ears are excellent at breaking down the frequency of sounds, but are imprecise about where the sound is coming from; whereas eyes are excellent at telling you where light is coming from, but imprecise about how its frequenc
22.
by OscarCunningham 8mo ago
There's an old Flash game called 'Chat Noir' where you have to trap a cat on a hexagonal grid. Here's a copy of it: https://www.hoodamath.com/games/chatnoir.html
23.
by OscarCunningham 9mo ago
But is a geostationary satellite going around the Earth?
24.
by OscarCunningham 10mo ago
Right. Interesting small patterns can be found using clever search algorithms. There's also the approach of running trillions of random 'soups' and scanning the results for interesting patterns. These small patterns are then
25.
by OscarCunningham 10mo ago
The problem is when you bisect an odd sized group. You necessarily have to make one half larger than the other. So you're not trying to misdirect, you're trying to avoid creating a signal. But to do this you have to sometimes put
26.
by OscarCunningham 10mo ago
One thing this doesn't take into account (and the paper acknowledges this) is that the characters are assigned by picking cards from a deck. So the two players cannot have the same character. Taking this into account would make the gam
27.
by OscarCunningham 10mo ago
Fans of Celtic knots might also like the daily game Celtix ( https://www.andrewt.net/puzzles/celtix/ ) where the objective is to separate a Celtic knot into five coloured strands.
28.
by OscarCunningham 11mo ago
I've even seen the BigQuery formatter change the behaviour of a query, by mixing a keyword from a comment into the real code.
29.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
The issue that spawned scalping and Ticketmaster is that musicians want to sell tickets under their market value. There's no analogous issue with airline pricing.
30.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
I had the opposite problem at my last company. When you hover over a link Apple's Mail app opens a preview of the page. So if you try to see the URL then you automatically visit the link and get sent for more training.

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