4 ms·

I don't think I really understand what you mean. What he said was that it stays at 10 years indefinitely. Either way, x+10 and e^x both go to infinity, so I gue

• tgb 10y ago
  I think the joke was to say that 'quantum computing being discovered' follows a Poisson distribution which models occurrences of events that arrive in a manner so that each one is independent of the previous one. Such as letters arriving in the mail or winning at roulette. Regardless of how long it's been since your last letter, you still guess that the next one will come on average, say, 5 days from now. Regardless of how long its been since you won at roulette, you should still expect your number to come up on average 38 tries from now. The exponential part is more like e^(-x) and refers to the exponential distribution [1] that gives the distribution of intervals in between Poisson events. So if its 'distributed exponentially' (whatever that means for a one-off event), the joke is that this would then give rise to the situation where researchers are always correct guessing 10 years off, even if they've been saying that for decades. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_distribution
  • ycmbntrthrwaway 10y ago
    > So if its 'distributed exponentially' (whatever that means for a one-off event) One-off event is not a problem. You can clone the world many times at the moment when scientists made their prediction and find the distribution over ensemble instead of over time.