The Proof Is Trivial | Hacker News Reader

The Proof Is Trivial

theproofistrivial.com

116 pointsllambda17 comments

Wow, this got picked up on HN too.

My roommate wrote this last year as a joke for CMU students. It's a simple script that pulls from a pre selected discrete set.

Author is Alan Pierce btw.

The script is trivial! Just view it as a concatenation of strings whose elements are pulled from a discrete set of terms.

s/discrete/finite/

Although it definitely is discrete as well.

...like all books ever written? :)

Thanks him for me, this silliness is just what I needed tonight.

To make it perfect, insert a line saying: "Website by M. Bourbaki."

I'm still waiting to get "The proof is trivial! Just biject it to an ordinal number whose elements are ordinal numbers!"

This would be even better if it was possible to annotate the randomly generated "proof" description with links to any actual proofs following that skeletal description.

be sure to reload the page a few times to get the right one :)

That's a non converging Monte-Carlo optimization with a constant cost function

Isn't Monte-Carlo non-converging by definition? If the algorithm converged it'd be a Las Vegas algorithm...

You're right : there is a lot of redundancy in my last sentence. But we're speaking about a non-nonsensical sentence describing an inept process...

I had to reload this about 10 times before I realized that the phrases were just utter nonsense.

Makes me think of an article I read many years ago (in, I think, Mathematics Magazine) titled "Confusion Rings" which parodied abstract algebra papers. About all I remember now is "heterocococomorphism".

I'll give this one a try. (Hetero)(co-coco)(morphism) - Heterosexual chocolate relations.

heterocococomorphism: A recursive pattern generalizing injection into mixed gender conga lines.

A lot more Reddit than HN to be honest, but thanks for the laughs in the office.

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