OscarCunningham

5 ms·

31.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
Thanks for this work. I switched from xfce when I realised that KDE was nearly as lightweight.
32.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
I've tried KDE in Debian and NixOS, and the experience is exactly the same. In many ways the choice of distro is much less impactful than the choice of desktop environment.
33.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
I don't agree (I'm the author). The difference is that Monty knows which of the doors the car is behind and deliberately avoids it, thereby giving away information about where the car is. Whereas in Minesweeper we've just bli
34.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
Yes, (original author here) in fact all the cells outside this region have an even better safety probability of 80.1%. I think the best move might be to start fresh in a new corner.
35.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
I think the human experts mostly care about speed rather than their average solve percentage. If they're forced to guess then they can just restart if they get it wrong.
36.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
He's written a bit about how it works here: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/quasiblog/mines... .
37.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
I don't think they were talking about negative temperature, they just mean that sometimes the convenient quantity to work with is β = 1/T.
38.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
The bot at https://mrgris.com/projects/minesweepr/ does these calculations, and has a winrate of 37.8% on expert. I don't know what a more naive bot would achieve.
39.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
I don't think temperature would be measured as energy, but rather as energy per information; e.g. joules per bit. Boltzmann's constant defines the degree as one joule per a very large number of bits, to get numbers convenient at m
40.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
Yeah, it's NP-complete to decide whether a cell in Minesweeper must be a mine: https://logic.pku.edu.cn/ann_attachments/np.pdf . In practice I suspect a SAT solver would make quick work of the positions that actual
41.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
Over on Mastodon we've just recently been having some fun with these techniques: Dithering: https://mathstodon.xyz/@andrewt/115035614385265413 Mondrian: https://mathstodon.xyz/@OscarCunningham&#x2F
42.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
The PPP median income of the US is 36% higher than Germany. If they want 30% fewer working hours then they can have it now, and 6% left over.
43.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
It's wild how people keep on talking about the prisoner's dilemma in the face of economist consensus that the selfishly dominant strategy is free trade. It's consistently easy for special interests to convince the public that
44.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
Is there a sequence where the sequence and all its differences contain each positive integer once? Something like 1 3 9 26 66 2 6 17 40 4 11 23 7 12 5 Oh, here it is: https://oeis.org&#x2
45.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
We also know the optimal circuits if you want to compute two boolean functions from four variables at the same time: https://cp4space.hatsya.com/2020/06/30/4-input-2-output-bool... .
46.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
I believe 'dpkg --get-selections' lists all packages, not just the ones the user installed. So if I installed some package foo that had a dependency bar, this method would have me carrying around bar even if foo updated to stop de
47.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
I recently installed NixOS on my laptop after years of using Debian, and the main difference I noticed was that it's much easier to keep everything clean. For example with Debian I might do something like try to get my GPU to work by i
48.
by OscarCunningham 1y ago
An easy way to percieve an oversaturated colour like this is to stare at one colour for a long time, and then switch to its complementary colour. The superposition of the colour and the afterimage of the same colour produces a more intense
49.
by OscarCunningham 2y ago
'Am I to understand that right now, you and I are the same person in some sort of meta-egg?' "Not as far as I know." 'Then it seems like you're teaching me to be moral for a reason that doesn't actually ap
50.
by OscarCunningham 2y ago
If the code is allowed repeats then the problem is much easier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence .
51.
by OscarCunningham 2y ago
I like Devereaux's take on the Spartans, but I see people repeating it every time the Spartan's are mentioned. I worry that I'm only getting to see two perspectives on the Spartans: the naive glorification and Devereaux'
52.
by OscarCunningham 2y ago
The additional constraint is that it has to use each colour exactly once.
53.
by OscarCunningham 2y ago
This reminds me of one of my favourite pieces of art, 'Order from Chaos' ( https://allrgb.com/order-from-chaos ). You can see it as an attempt to map two dimensional space to three dimensional space in such a way th
54.
by OscarCunningham 2y ago
This is called 'vdiff' in the Jargon File: https://jargonfile.johnswitzerland.com/vdiff.html
55.
by OscarCunningham 2y ago
Right, they made the odd choice to use Life to simulate a different cellular automaton and then built logic gates in that automaton. But you can in fact build logic gates directly with gliders in the Game of Life itself. The extra level of
56.
by OscarCunningham 2y ago
Right. The principled way to interact with a GoL computer is to implement yourself in the game.
57.
by OscarCunningham 2y ago
There are the Lucky Numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_number . Generated by a variant of the Sieve of Eratosthenes, they're believed to have a similar distribution to the primes while not having similar m
58.
by OscarCunningham 2y ago
So if their available interest rates had ever dropped below 6.25% then the issuers should have bought it back?
59.
by OscarCunningham 2y ago
In this game, all strategies have the same expected value, so long as they follow the rule 'if the remaining deck is all the same colour, then you should bet everything you have on that colour'.
60.
by OscarCunningham 2y ago
You're confusing antimatter with dark matter.

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