6 ms·
What comes next: π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, ...?
- benjoffe 14y agoWhile the story at the end about the bug report is humourous, it's a pretty mean thing to do. Perhaps 3 days lost work was longer than the expected damage, but one would imagine it would waste at least a few hours of someone's time, which is not something I'd feel good about. On an unrelated note, sometimes using a computer not configured to British English I get spelling corrections for words like "humourous" above, as a sanity check I usually Google the word, it would be really helpful if Google displayed a message that it was the British version of the word, instead of displaying: "Did you mean humorous?".
- pestaa 14y agoThe first thing I would have done if I was assigned to this case is to check whether it is really a bug or just a feature.
- Splines 14y ago3 days does sound like a long time if you're an expert in the product. If they weren't, then those 3 days are very likely well spent.
- JadeNB 14y agoAre you sure that it wouldn't have taken you 3 days to check that?
- pestaa 14y agoIt'd take me 3 weeks to check since I'm really poor at this level of math. Probably the reason I'm not going to maintain such software. ;)
- m_for_monkey 14y agoInterestingly, while humor/humour is a US/British difference, humorous/humourous is not, the latter is just rare/unusual. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humour https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humour https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humourous https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humourous
- benjoffe 14y agoAh I see, thanks, there are certainly better examples though, after a few minutes I found 'unshakeable'* which google tries to correct to the American version, yet is standard British English. * https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=unshakeable https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=unshakeable (even makes the mistake on the UK Google site).
- waqf 14y ago> rare/unusual Or "misspelt/misspelled", as we prescriptivists like to call it. Though when I see hypercorrections like "humourous" on the internet, I begin to suspect that people are using UK/Commonwealth spellings because they think they should, not because they're actually more familiar with those spelling conventions.
- davidjohnstone 14y agoThis is why I don't like "what comes next in this sequence" questions. Most of the time I can come up with a reason for choosing the answer I do, but that's not necessarily the same reason as the question asker has for their "correct" answer.
- CodeMage 14y agoPrecisely. The correct answer to such questions, whenever they don't include additional context/restrictions, is "Anything at all."
- icode 14y agoWhat means the "d" in those formulas?
- est 14y agodelta
- alex1 14y agoActually, it means differential.
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- lclarkmichalek 14y agoWhile delta is technically wrong, it is correct in that dx represents delta x, where delta x tends to 0.
- manojlds 14y agoDelta x is represented as Δx
- Natsu 14y agoHere's a good explanation of what it means: http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/60949.html http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/60949.html
- rmc 14y agoIt's a notation for integrals, part of calculus. The "d" doesn't refer to anything http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral
- aqme28 14y ago
- conanite 14y agoThis reminds me of another "surprise" series: 0, 1, 2, 720!, ...
- civild 14y agoYou gave it away with a slight error - the sequence is 0, 1, 2, 720... For the curious, the sequence follows factorial (!) applied twice, i.e. (0!)!, (1!)! etc. (3!)! is 720, and (4!)! is 6.20448402 × 10^23.
- anonymoushn 14y agoI have (0!)! = (1!)! = 1 over here.
- benjoffe 14y agoIn that case the sequence should be 1, 1, 2, 720... as zero factorial equals one. https://www.google.com/search?q=0 https://www.google.com/search?q=0!
- civild 14y agoOops, quite right!
- dedward 14y ago0 is correct pragmatacally, and makes the puzzle harder for those not wise that 0!=1 by the definition of factorial. (as opposed to proof.... factorial being a shorthand for math and ths being convenient. if there were a proof it would be a theorem, which its not.) i knew factorial but i had to read up on 0!, news to me too. on another note, without context, we could say there is an infinite set of functions that satisfy any such question. "what could come next and why" or something. edit: 1 is indeed correct for the sequence, ignore that part... my bad.
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- Jabbles 14y agoI'm not sure I like the idea that there's anything special about this. Making an arbitrary sequence that suddenly diverges isn't hard: f(k) = k^(max(0,k-5)). Involving real numbers just adds to the repertoire of hiding techniques.
- ralfd 14y agoI actually did find the "nightmare dilemmas" on the site more interesting. http://www.thebigquestions.com/2012/03/22/another-nightmare/ http://www.thebigquestions.com/2012/03/22/another-nightmare/ -------------------------------- -------------------------------- Today’s Dilemma In front of you are two childless married couples. For some reason, it’s imperative that you kill two of the four people. Your choices are: A. Kill one randomly chosen member from each couple. B. Kill both members of a randomly chosen couple. All four people agree that if they die, they want to be well remembered. Therefore all four ask you, please, to choose A so that anyone who dies will be remembered by a loving spouse. If you care about the four people in front of you, what should you do? -------------------------------- Argument 1. For goodness’s sake, they’ve told you what to do. If you care about them, of course you should respect their wishes. Choose A. Argument 2.Once the killings are over, Option A leaves two grieving spouses, whereas Option B leaves one relieved couple. Surely two dead plus two happy is better than two dead plus two sad. Choose B. Which argument do you buy? And what’s wrong with the other one? --------------------------------
- vacri 14y agoCaring about someone often means disregarding their wishes - see the concepts of toughlove or intervention.
- lathamcity 14y agoI too found them more interesting. Is there a collection of these somewhere?
- joshuahedlund 14y agoI think there's some interpersonal utility comparisons in there.
- Symmetry 14y agoThat's actually a fairly neat question for sifting different types of Utilitarians. Do you care about other people's happiness, or about their utility as they define it? In B you're really screwing over one of the couples, but they won't be around to be unhappy about it.
- jl6 14y agoGiven an arbitrarily long or short sequence of numbers, random or otherwise, it is possible to find a polynomial which interpolates them, hence gives a reasonable rule for finding the next number in the sequence.
- Symmetry 14y agoUsually the right next number in a sequence is the one with the lowest entropy, but of course the answer that the post's author says is the "correct" one is far from the simplest way to generate the same sequence of 7 numbers.
- jerf 14y agoEntropy is relative to your encoding scheme plus or minus a constant. Usually you can ignore this fact when dealing with large amounts of information, because almost all human-interesting encoding schemes are related by relatively small constants, but when handed a small set of numbers it suddenly dominates as the constant for very reasonable schemes relative to other very reasonable schemes can exceed the size of the bits given to you in the form of the original numbers. This argument basically collapses back down to, no, there still isn't enough information in a short sequence to identify the next number truly uniquely.
- dedward 14y agoor any sequence, no? not without context.
- Symmetry 14y agoYes, a function's Kolmogorov Complexity[1] does indeed depend on the encoding, but you would certainly have to go out of your way to find an encoding where the official answer can be expressed more easily than "f(n) = pi/2". [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity I didn't use the term because I didn't think most people would recognize it, but we're getting technical now.
- brentashley 14y agoApparently, "Error establishing database connection.".
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