eigenket

41 ms·

601.
by eigenket 5y ago
But what incentivises the students to take a class that so many won't pass? I don't really understand the American university system but surely the sensible choice would be to take a course you're most likely to pass? I guess
602.
by eigenket 5y ago
For most maths, at least the stuff you'd learn before or during an undergrad degree the interesting maths is the journey. The teacher is attempting to teach you to ride a bike, and the student is like "this is stupid, I already
603.
by eigenket 5y ago
That sounds like either an absolutely terrible teacher, or a terrible program. Why were so many people enrolled in a class that less than 25% would pass? I'm not American so I don't really understand the course names but I guess a
604.
by eigenket 5y ago
There is not really a meaningful joint distribution. Some quantum observables are incompatible with each other which essentially means they can't be assigned simultaneous values. More precisely a quantum observable is a map (a functi
605.
by eigenket 5y ago
Slightly off topic but you can take the "Pythagorean theorem" as an axiom - given the first 4 Euclidean axioms it turns out that the 5th axiom is exactly equivalent to the Pythagorean theorem. You can equivalently start with the p
606.
by eigenket 5y ago
Free will, as physicists talk about it, essentially means that my choice to perform some experiments is independent of the state of the system I'm experimenting on. In other words I want it to be true that looking at the system doesn&#
607.
by eigenket 5y ago
Physicists essentially like "free will" because it is essential to do physics in a meaningful way (*). If you have something like superdeterminism then everything can be set up to make it look like your experimental results mean s
608.
by eigenket 5y ago
If you take this reasoning seriously you get the Everettian / "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. If a human experimenter is treated as a fundamentally quantum object then they end up entangled with the particl
609.
by eigenket 5y ago
Yeah I'm pretty sure I understand what you're talking about and as far as I can tell it doesn't really have anything to do with quantum mechanics at all. Entanglement is "just" the result of the fact that the space
610.
by eigenket 5y ago
This has nothing whatsoever to do with entanglement.
611.
by eigenket 5y ago
Thats a bit like saying the gold standard for programming is formal verification. Sure in an ideal world maybe every piece of code would be formally verified, but its not realistic and (for the vast majority of use cases) wouldn't be o
612.
by eigenket 5y ago
That depends on the field, especially in areas of pure maths I see this "slide-deck" style way less.
613.
by eigenket 5y ago
Currently transforming a new piece of maths from its "standard" form (i.e. what working mathematicians actually use) to something a computer can understand is a big task that usually takes a team of experts something of the order
614.
by eigenket 5y ago
The point of the starcraft bot was never to be able to beat humans, it was about getting headlines and moving on. To be honest getting good at starcraft isn't really an interesting problem for AI to solve, you can probably do it if you
615.
by eigenket 5y ago
You're differentiating the function f(y) = e^y with respect to y
616.
by eigenket 5y ago
The tex for my thesis is on github but I don't expect anyone to ever look at it there (anyone who might read it will find it on arxiv), I just used github for backup & versioning (I'm not quite dumb enough to have a document r
617.
by eigenket 5y ago
I've seen pretty bright seeming UK university applicants able to do whatever you ask them but then completely shit the bed when you ask them to differentiate e^y with respect to y rather than e^x with respect to x.
618.
by eigenket 5y ago
Freedman gets the credit for the bits of the proof that are his, the authors of this book get the credits for the novel stuff they add.
619.
by eigenket 5y ago
Getting a proof, even in one that is amenable to computer verification into a form where you can actually verify it is a monumental task, like it can easily take multiple experts multiple years. Adding to this problem the intersection of ma
620.
by eigenket 5y ago
My record for one I've actually solved is like 6 months working on a problem (on and off). I'm actually more of a physicist than a mathematician (although my work is all about proving theorems and lemmas), so the objects I work wi
621.
by eigenket 5y ago
A good start is to try easier problems that will hopefully provide some insight into the hard problem. I.e. if you have some theorem you want to prove about all matrices of a certain form then do it for 2x2 and 3x3 matrices first or somethi
622.
by eigenket 5y ago
Once you get over the bonkers UI its pretty easy to make a dwarf fortress that can survive essentially forever, farmers are ridiculously productive so you can support a population of 100-200 pretty easily with 10 or fewer farmers.
623.
by eigenket 5y ago
Frostpunk has a little of this - there aren't any elections but if you piss people off enough they'll run you out of town (and you lose the game).
624.
by eigenket 5y ago
Yeah I have no idea what the author is getting at there. One obvious way to put a topology on the space of binary streams is to think of them as binary expansions of real numbers in the interval [0, 1] (the notation is supposed to indicate
625.
by eigenket 5y ago
Virtual particles are basically just a mathematical trick to make doing calculations easier in perturbative quantum field theory. You shouldn't take them too seriously. If you do the calculations in another way (e.g. by discretizing st
626.
by eigenket 5y ago
Note that light isn't particularly special in this context, what is special (very special) is the speed of light. Other things travel at the speed of light, indeed everything massless is forced to travel at the speed of light. Other th
627.
by eigenket 5y ago
1.2 x 10^6 liters or 1200 m^3. I am a european so the units are unfamiliar to me but I think the acre-foot is actually a decent unit to use for this sort of thing. When you're dealing with covering agricultural land (I guess measured i
628.
by eigenket 5y ago
Growing cows you mean. Half of California's water usage is growing alfalfa to feed to cattle. Not half of agricultural usage, half of total usage. The almond thing is basically a meme in comparison. Not that the almond farms shouldn&#x
629.
by eigenket 5y ago
But quantum mechanics is exactly the opposite of what a programmer would add. At least as far as we understand it is (exponentially) harder to simulate quantum systems than classical ones.
630.
by eigenket 5y ago
Why when asked about "sabotage of critical energy providers and food providers in Russia or China" do you reply with sabotage of something in Iran which is neither an energy nor food provider?

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