3 ms·

"Kill all humans!" ~ Bender B. Rodriguez Headline the next day: "Crime rate on Earth now at an all-time low of zero percent!"

• phoe-krk 3y ago
  How do you calculate this value of zero percent? Divide all the crime cases of the previous day by the number of humans? And who wrote the headline?
  • hansvm 3y ago
    > How do you calculate this value of zero percent? This gets messy for obvious topological/continuity reasons, but a shocking number of applications are both correct and simple to reason about if you choose to define 0/0 == 0 (kind of like how if you choose to universally define sum(empty_set) == 0 and product(empty_set) == 1 then tons of higher-level formulae just work and don't have to special-case a base case). In context, there's no good reason to pick that definition of 0/0 per se (other than my prior that 0/0 == 0 probably simplifies some downstream math), but it's kind of nice to see that if crime is at 0% then there is also zero crime. > And who wrote the headline? Now we're asking the real questions ;)
    • sokoloff 3y ago
      "Kill all humans except for one" would be a way to resolve this (at least for 1-80 years).
    • blooalien 3y ago
      > "And who wrote the headline?" Probably a "NewsBot" of some sort?