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One can think of many better ways to harness human intelligence than work on an arbitrary puzzle... unless this is an interview for something much bigger.
by vladislav 8y ago
One can think of many better ways to harness human intelligence than work on an arbitrary puzzle... unless this is an interview for something much bigger.
- Alex3917 8y agoI mean pretty much the only math that didn't come from arbitrary puzzle solving was that which was done for religious purposes, and that stuff powers pretty much all of modern society.
- Nuzzerino 8y agoReligious purposes? I'm curious to know what you meant specifically. Metaphysics?
- Alex3917 8y agoGeometry, calculus, set theory, etc.
- gjm11 8y agoIn what sense was all that done "for religious purposes"? The ancient Greeks developed a ton of geometry. I'm not sure how we could ever know for sure why they did it, but a clue might be in the name of the field: geo-metria, earth-measurement. (And it's known that some of them made use of geometry for practical purposes, or at least proposed doing so.) Newton (so far as I can tell) developed calculus in order to do physics. Neither arbitrary puzzle-solving nor religion (though I'm sure Newton enjoyed solving puzzles and he was a religious believer). Cantor certainly had some peculiar religious ideas that may have motivated his work on the beginnings of set theory. On the other hand, his first publication on the subject looks as if its goal is to provide a beautiful short proof of a theorem already proved by Liouville (on the existence of transcendental numbers); I suppose you could call that a "puzzle" on the grounds that everything in pure mathematics is puzzles, but I think Cantor would have viewed it as a practical application -- in the sense that it's useful for something else in mathematics. Puzzle-solving, perhaps, but not arbitrary puzzle-solving.
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- Exuma 8y agoWhy is it so bad to have fun?
- bweitzman 8y ago> I don't want to donate to charity (I have my own reasons for that, don't ask) but whoever cracks the code can do whatever he/she wants (including donating to charity).
- stale2002 8y agoI think it is really funny when people criticize something that is altruistic, but not altruistic enough for your tastes. Are you going around saying "why don't these rich people stop buying yachts!". At least this guy did something that wasn't entirely selfish. Which is more than can be said about most people in the world.
- vladislav 8y agoI actually have nothing against frivolous spending, since buying a yacht doesn't subtract from the high end talent pool. If you're going to put up a few mil to solve a math problem, why not something like P v. NP, or the Riemann hypothesis, or countless applied math problems. Instead it was spent on some kind of spectacle of arbitrary mental effort.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoCome on. There already is a $1 million bounty on P vs NP.
- quickthrower2 8y agoCrypto people don't want P=NP though.
- TFYS 8y agoBuying a yacht does subtract from a high end talent pool. It requires talented people to design and build a yacht.
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- vladislav 8y agoHigh end is a very relative term. No doubt it requires talented people, but you don't see Feynman working on it.
- 8y ago
- jonknee 8y agoBitcoin itself is all about mining arbitrary puzzles, there is really no more fitting way to give it away than this.