Comment A better question: (Score 0, Troll) 162
Who the fuck is Bennett Haselton and why should a give a single shit about what he says?
Who the fuck is Bennett Haselton and why should a give a single shit about what he says?
Tort reform has been aggressively resisted by half of the US political system for decades, despite its issues exerting a pernicious effect on everything from education to medicine to the economy.
https://www.opensecrets.org/or...
Notice which party they're giving to.
Vote accordingly.
A very cool problem! Thank you for sharing it and helping us along with the discussion.
You're right that I ruled out the opponent voluntarily using rock, based on the informal idea that it could only make things worse, since the weakness of the opponent comes from what is already a strategy with too many rocks, which will be countered. I also ruled out ever using scissors against that rock-heavy strategy in a similarly informal way. And this makes the problem fairly easy to calculate.
So, here's something I haven't thought about yet: What is the opponent's optimal strategy on the turns where he gets to choose what he throws?
First, there is some uncertainty about what ratio of your opponent's throws will be paper. Let's call that ratio x. This means that we can define the likelyhood of his throws this way:
HeDoesRock =
Now you need to figure out the optimal winning ratio of your throwing either rock or paper.
YouWinIfRock = HeDoesScissors = (.5 - x); YouLoseIfRock = HeDoesPaper = x
YouWinIfPaper = HeDoesRock =
Winning Margin = FreqRock[(.5 - x) - x] + FreqPaper[.5 - (.5 - x)] = FreqRock(.5 - 2x) + FreqPaper(x)
Now take the first derivative of winning margin and set it to zero to find the maximum:
d/dx
So 2(FreqRock) = FreqPaper, so you should throw paper twice as often as you throw rock. And surprisingly, you can get this result without ever needing to know x, the optimal ratio of your opponent throwing paper. Is that right?
To figure out what you should do, first assume your opponent is rational, and will make good choices whenever he is able. Since he knows that you will play a paper-heavy strategy to counter his rock-heavy strategy, it would not be rational to voluntarily choose more rocks. That could only make things worse.
But if he tried to exploit your paper-heavy strategy by throwing scissors on turns when he gets a choice, you'd have a perfect strategy against this: All rock. On forced rock, you get a redo, and on non-forced rock, he does scissors and you win. So on first pass, I think that your opponent should favor paper when he can choose. It's not like you'll ever do scissors. That's auto-lose half the time - basically a complete surrender of your advantage. So paper is a safe move for your opponent.
The problem is that if he did 50% rock and 50% paper, then all-paper will be your perfect counter. He won't let you do that, so he'll have to throw in some scissors. Just how many? It looks now like you will both simultaneously have to determine optimal strategies in order to answer that question, and this will require derivatives of two sets of optimal-choice equations - so that you can solve for the two maxima. Sounds like a fun problem!
"Future historians will place tremendous blame on China's government
Unless, as many suspect, they'll be writing in Chinese. Then perhaps the 'memory' of events will perhaps be slightly different.
If I still lived in California I would also have been "virulently opposed" to prop 8, but I hate the idea of judging someone's employability based on how they vote. To suggest that Google would treat Mozilla differently simply based on a single-issue stance of its new CEO is really selling them short. They invest in Mozilla for strategic reasons. (Mozilla isn't some sort of lazy couch-crasher that Google supports because of Mozilla's charming personality.)
And for that matter, I don't think we should judge products based on the ideology of the people who created them. To save us some time, I'll get straight to a Hitler example, noting that Hitler personally played an important role in the design of the VW Beetle. But hippies can still drive Beetles without thereby supporting Hitler.
Generation ships are pointlessly risky, heavy, expensive and tedious for the inhabitants. Accelerating a city of humans to acceptable speeds is just bad scifi. Rather than the colonists being born en route in some miserable spaceship full of stressed cooped-up people, I say it's better that they are born at their destination, in an orbiting nursery that could partially be constructed from local materials. The parenting would have to be done by AI and the gestating would happen in an artificial womb, but both of these technologies will be ready long before a suitable propulsion system is perfected. There are already independent reasons to pursue both parenting/tutoring AI and artificial wombs for terrestrial applications, and I expect that both systems will be usable in the lifetimes of some of today's slashdotters. Children being raised by AI is potentially controversial, but before long, AIs will be better at parenting than the many millions of bad human parents in the world today, who still get to keep their kids. And it will keep improving, even if human parents don't.
The worries about genetic diversity are just stupid. We could easily just bring along frozen fertilized eggs, which will remain viable with proper shielding for even a century-long trip. These could be gestated by the early generations of colonists, or by the artificial wombs that they brought along. But I would think they'd serve as a backup. Much less cumbersome would be to simply transmit some suitable DNA sequences from Earth once the colony ship arrives, and print it to DNA using Venter technology that we basically already have. The process is less likely than freezing to introduce errors. The privilege of instantiating your DNA in another solar system could be a reward for super-awesome human beings that do cool stuff in the decades that the ship is en route - a kind of Nobel Prize for being a worthwhile person.
The point of any stellar colony ship is to travel light - as light as possible. That means bringing 3D printers that could use materials at the destination to make the stuff that the colony will need: initially, a space station and its facilities. If this payload is light enough - just tools that are able to make the necessary tools on site - then conventional nuclear propulsion might be enough to accelerate the ship to an acceptable speed, and we'd be ready to launch in a mere 150 years. In comparison, a cumbersome ship that hosts a city of 40,000 people, plus all the farms they will need to stay alive for a century, plus all the facilities they will need to keep from going insane, will launch
...is that the main barrier to efficient algorithms for exiting Burning Man would boil down to "Rules are a drag, man."
FWIW I was only about 50 miles south of Tower MN when they hit -60F (-51C) and was outside a fair amount of the time that evening.
Honestly, from the POV of a northern MN resident, there isn't THAT much difference in feeling between -50C and -35C (unless there's wind), and the fact that I can say that authoritatively would already suggest that I'm a giant step more psychologically capable of accepting a martian equatorial climate of +20C down to maybe -20C, than is some mamby-pamby Californian or Floridian.
And why it'll never get solved?
"always Republicans (Score:5, Insightful) "
Who's been responsible for our worthless education system breeding generations of ignorance that elect these congressmen? Democrats.
Who's inculcated a culture of 'victim mentality' and balkanized the US population into enclaves of entitlement and grievance? Democrats.
Who politicized science away from a simple, relatively objective process into advocacy, spinning facts to suit political goals? Democrats.
Just sayin'. There's PLENTY of blame to go around. As much as the Republicans seem to be a party of know-nothings, Democrats (with their recent political successes) are more of an arrogant, patronizing party of know-it-alls. Let's remember that the Democrats position on nuclear power since the 1970s has, for example, made global warming immeasurably worse.
"...The outcome is pretty clear, either science wins or humanity looses."
When one is railing against ignorance, one needs to make sure they use words correctly.
I'm just sayin'.
"...The stress will be compounded by the fact that the only time the crew will be able to leave their habitat-yurt is when they're wearing puffy, insulated uniforms that simulate space suits..."
Seriously, they're doing this in HAWAII?
That quote above is pretty much normal life for 6 months every year in MN...he said, looking out the window at 10" of new snow on April 4.
I'm only 80% joking. I kind of wonder if the people from here (and northward into America's hat) would be just psychologically better prepared for this sort of thing from a lifetime of having great chunks of your year sequestered inside.
Kleeneness is next to Godelness.
