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The SF Anthology Problem – Solved
- mtVessel 6y agoSorry, the real problem is figuring out which 10 stories are actually worth reading, per Sturgeon's Law.
- pjmorris 6y agoWell... the anthologies are selected from a much deeper pool of magazines, so it's possible the percentage is higher.
- freddie_mercury 6y agoHow is this comment relevant to this post? The whole point of the post is that the author has already told you what 10 stories* are actually worth reading and is now telling you which anthologies to buy to read those 10 stories. *: Technically it is a list of 275 stories worth reading from across the entire history of science fiction, which is why there is a math challenge to figure out exactly which 22 books you needed to buy to get those 275 stories.
- egypturnash 6y agoIt’s relevant because someone had to make some comments that fall into the “90% of everything” category. :)
- nl 6y agoApparently the real problem is getting people to read beyond a headline. TL;DR: which stories to read was already solved.
- svat 6y agoThis is a standard set cover problem. At these sizes it should be possible to find a guaranteed optimal solution rather than heuristics AFAICT.
- svat 6y ago(Posting here just for completeness…) Yes it can be solved optimally: https://shreevatsa.net/post/set-cover-ip/ https://shreevatsa.net/post/set-cover-ip/
- 8bitsrule 6y agoI didn't see this 1964 Hugo-winner by Simak on the list. Somebody fixed that. http://lib.ru/SIMAK/waystat.txt http://lib.ru/SIMAK/waystat.txt Hmmm ... I guess that's not a short-story. Now ... what's the title of his short story (same topic) about the gophers with toolboxes who 'bent' a guy's house?