OscarCunningham

Thanks for this work. I switched from xfce when I realised that KDE was nearly as lightweight.

I've tried KDE in Debian and NixOS, and the experience is exactly the same. In many ways the choice of distro is much less impactful than the choice of desktop environment.

I don't agree (I'm the author).

The difference is that Monty knows which of the doors the car is behind and deliberately avoids it, thereby giving away information about where the car is.

Whereas in Minesweeper we've just blindly stumbled across a situation where we have to guess.

It would be like if every show Monty always revealed a random door. Sometimes he would reveal the car and the game would end immediately. In the cases when he didn't reveal the car it really would be 50/50 between the remaining two doors.

Yes, (original author here) in fact all the cells outside this region have an even better safety probability of 80.1%. I think the best move might be to start fresh in a new corner.

I think the human experts mostly care about speed rather than their average solve percentage. If they're forced to guess then they can just restart if they get it wrong.

He's written a bit about how it works here: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/quasiblog/mines....

I don't think they were talking about negative temperature, they just mean that sometimes the convenient quantity to work with is β = 1/T.

The bot at https://mrgris.com/projects/minesweepr/ does these calculations, and has a winrate of 37.8% on expert. I don't know what a more naive bot would achieve.

I don't think temperature would be measured as energy, but rather as energy per information; e.g. joules per bit. Boltzmann's constant defines the degree as one joule per a very large number of bits, to get numbers convenient at macroscopic scales.

Yeah, it's NP-complete to decide whether a cell in Minesweeper must be a mine: https://logic.pku.edu.cn/ann_attachments/np.pdf.

In practice I suspect a SAT solver would make quick work of the positions that actually appear in games.

Over on Mastodon we've just recently been having some fun with these techniques:

Dithering: https://mathstodon.xyz/@andrewt/115035614385265413

Mondrian: https://mathstodon.xyz/@OscarCunningham/115049490241833844

Hand Drawn: https://mathstodon.xyz/@andrewt/115056697540191327

Bad Apple: https://pony.social/@luna/115057532794342459

White Noise: https://pony.social/@luna/115058126613306302

The PPP median income of the US is 36% higher than Germany. If they want 30% fewer working hours then they can have it now, and 6% left over.

It's wild how people keep on talking about the prisoner's dilemma in the face of economist consensus that the selfishly dominant strategy is free trade. It's consistently easy for special interests to convince the public that tariffs are part of a sophisticated strategic/moral dilemma, while in fact they're just handouts. Likewise the glorification of China. The idea that the Communist Party might make bad economic decisions is never considered.

Is there a sequence where the sequence and all its differences contain each positive integer once?

Something like

    1 3 9   26  66
     2 6  17  40
      4 11  23
       7  12
        5

Oh, here it is: https://oeis.org/A035313

We also know the optimal circuits if you want to compute two boolean functions from four variables at the same time: https://cp4space.hatsya.com/2020/06/30/4-input-2-output-bool....

I believe 'dpkg --get-selections' lists all packages, not just the ones the user installed. So if I installed some package foo that had a dependency bar, this method would have me carrying around bar even if foo updated to stop depending on it.

I recently installed NixOS on my laptop after years of using Debian, and the main difference I noticed was that it's much easier to keep everything clean.

For example with Debian I might do something like try to get my GPU to work by installing nouveau, try various configs, then uninstall nouveau and install the Nvidia proprietary drivers. But then when I finally got the GPU working, I'd worry. Are some of those config changes I tried for nouveau still affecting my system? Has all that mucking around left my GPU forever in a suboptimal state?

With Nix, it might take just as much tinkering to get the GPU to work. But once I'm done, I know that my system is exactly as I've defined it in configuration.nix. Anything else I tried along the way will just sit inertly in /nix/store until the garbage collector wipes it away.

An easy way to percieve an oversaturated colour like this is to stare at one colour for a long time, and then switch to its complementary colour. The superposition of the colour and the afterimage of the same colour produces a more intense effect.

'Am I to understand that right now, you and I are the same person in some sort of meta-egg?'

"Not as far as I know."

'Then it seems like you're teaching me to be moral for a reason that doesn't actually apply in the real world.'

"Get back in the box."

If the code is allowed repeats then the problem is much easier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence.

I like Devereaux's take on the Spartans, but I see people repeating it every time the Spartan's are mentioned. I worry that I'm only getting to see two perspectives on the Spartans: the naive glorification and Devereaux's takedown. Does anyone know of a good third source? Ideally another historian who would still be interesting to an amateur.

The additional constraint is that it has to use each colour exactly once.

This reminds me of one of my favourite pieces of art, 'Order from Chaos' (https://allrgb.com/order-from-chaos). You can see it as an attempt to map two dimensional space to three dimensional space in such a way that close points get sent to close points.

This is called 'vdiff' in the Jargon File: https://jargonfile.johnswitzerland.com/vdiff.html

Right, they made the odd choice to use Life to simulate a different cellular automaton and then built logic gates in that automaton. But you can in fact build logic gates directly with gliders in the Game of Life itself. The extra level of abstraction multiplies the area of the final result by about 20000.

Right. The principled way to interact with a GoL computer is to implement yourself in the game.

There are the Lucky Numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_number. Generated by a variant of the Sieve of Eratosthenes, they're believed to have a similar distribution to the primes while not having similar multiplicative properties.

So if their available interest rates had ever dropped below 6.25% then the issuers should have bought it back?

In this game, all strategies have the same expected value, so long as they follow the rule 'if the remaining deck is all the same colour, then you should bet everything you have on that colour'.

You're confusing antimatter with dark matter.