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Mostly unrelated but this made me check to see if the Prime Number Shitting Bear is still online. It is! https://alpha61.com/primenumbershittingbear/ https://al
by egypturnash 7y ago
Mostly unrelated but this made me check to see if the Prime Number Shitting Bear is still online. It is! https://alpha61.com/primenumbershittingbear/ https://alpha61.com/primenumbershittingbear/
- JKCalhoun 7y agoThe classic prime joke (saw it originally in Sci Am back in the ... 70's? 80's?). Found an approximation when I googled it: A mathematician, physicist, and engineer are taking a math test. One question asks "Are all odd numbers prime?" The mathematician thinks, "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime -- nope, not all odd numbers are prime." The physicist thinks, "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 ... experimental error, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, yes, they're all prime." The engineer thinks, "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 11 is prime, ..."
- askvictor 7y agoThe version I remember has the mathematician thinking: "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, so by mathematical induction, all odd numbers are prime".
- javajosh 7y agoIt just occurred to me how strange it is that you can get to some numbers by addition that you cannot get to by multiplying any subset of the earlier sequence. Emotionally, it feels like addition and multiplication are arguing over who's better, and multiplication is like "I'm so fast", and addition is like, "I'm slow but, I can go places you can't". It'd be cool, if there was a Maker, that they make it so that some very large prime number is a message to all intelligent life capable of computing and deciphering it. This kind of message would penetrate even nested, simulated universes, and could only come from World 0, assuming the properties of numbers are independent of physical constants. Why not have a SETI-in-the-primes project, after all?
- skissane 7y ago> It'd be cool, if there was a Maker, that they make it so that some very large prime number is a message to all intelligent life capable of computing and deciphering it Every possible message is already there. Just like how Borges’ Library of Babel contains every possible book (within its limits of size and format)
- javajosh 7y agoThat cannot be true. It does not contain the message '4'. (Or any of the non-primes.) In fact it seems like there must be many more non-primes than primes over any finite interval (for the simple reason that multiplication gets a lot of whacks at the piñata, e.g. producing a product landing in that finite interval.) So to answer your implied question ("why bother commucating with primes anwyay?") I guess the value of limiting your message to "a really big prime number" is to make discovery hard, but still tenable. It should be pretty big, like big enough for a good bible sized book, say 1 gigabyte, and start with something really obviously artificial, or unexpected looking, like starting as a 1 with 20,000 zeroes, or maybe better, 20k perfect 010101 and then after a few thousand, 00110011, and from there establish a language protocol, and write the book. But you'd have to expect people to check only primes for these simple patterns, because it's really easy to produce meaningful sequences with addition, and really hard with multiplication (AFAIK).
- skissane 7y ago> That cannot be true. It does not contain the message '4'. (Or any of the non-primes.) Any finite message (containing a finite number of symbols drawn from a finite alphabet) can be represented as a positive integer. Any positive integer n can be encoded in a prime, even a composite integer. Use the following encoding system: write 1 n times, followed by a zero, followed by an arbitrary bit string. For example, for 4: 11110xxxxxxxxxxxxx... Using that encoding system, there will be an infinite number of primes that encode 4 - all the primes which start with 11110 in binary. Thus, the set of all primes contains an infinite number of copies of every possible finite message.
- Tainnor 7y agothat's not mathematical induction though. it's what philosophers call "induction", i.e. building theories out of empirical observations (as opposed to deduction; mathematical induction is weirdly named because it's actually purely deductive)
- OJFord 7y agoThat's extrapolation I suppose, but not induction. For induction you'd need to say '1 is prime, n+2 is prime where n is prime, so [...]'.
- askvictor 7y agoYes, I know. It's a joke. Making fun of mathematicians, physicists and engineers.
- JKCalhoun 7y agoYou heard that in your engineering course.....
- progval 7y agoAmazon thinks, "music is Prime, video is Prime, pantry is Prime, day is Prime, ..."
- saagarjha 7y ago> The engineer thinks, "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 11 is prime, ..." Surely the engineer would round it to the nearest power of ten and thus discount all of the numbers?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bjornsing 7y agoSurely the mathematician would think “if all odd numbers were prime then the Riemann hypothesis would be trivially false, so obviously they cannot be”.
- jraph 7y agoYes, and the programmer thinks: "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime, 9 is not prime, 9 is not prime, …"
- jerrytsai 7y agoHelp with the joke? I understood the mathematician and the physicist, but not the engineer. What stereotype is being invoked?
- freepor 7y agoThat's a mouse.