o_nate

35 ms·

361.
by o_nate 16y ago
According to this, Wikileaks is no longer available on Amazon either: http://online.wsj.com/article/AP90b4520b2a9b455ea6e9d8d66fae...
362.
by o_nate 16y ago
_The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL_ by Ken Henderson is unusually readable for a programming book. Perhaps it's a bit dated now, but still a good source of information.
363.
by o_nate 16y ago
This is an amazing solution, but the original question asked for the "optimal" solution. How can we be sure that this solution is the optimal solution? Is there a way to prove that no better solution can exist? Edit: apparently there is a
364.
by o_nate 16y ago
OK, I gave up and looked at the answer. Pretty amazing. Just out of curiosity, why isn't the probability of my solution equal to 1/2^50? edit: I think I found the answer: it should be equal to (50!)^2/100!, right? Now, how to decide if t
365.
by o_nate 16y ago
Here's another link that explains it pretty well without using any fancy math: http://www.mast.queensu.ca/~peter/inprocess/prisoners.pdf edit: I agree that this does involve some math, but I like that it all can be derived from basic prin
366.
by o_nate 16y ago
I'm going to post my current thinking on this, in the hopes that maybe someone can give me a hint without revealing the whole solution: It seems to me that the best that the prisoners can do is 1/2^50 (and the worst they can do is 0). For
367.
by o_nate 16y ago
I can see that the prisoners can do better than 1/2^100, but I don't see how they could get anywhere close to 10% success - so I must be missing something big here.
368.
by o_nate 16y ago
So if I understand this correctly, once the prisoners start opening boxes, there is no communication allowed between them, right?
369.
by o_nate 16y ago
Interesting that the guy was apparently not a good coder: "He is not a gifted programmer — according to Watt and Toey, in fact, he can barely write simple code — but by all accounts he can understand systems and fillet them with singular gr
370.
by o_nate 16y ago
This is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem, isn't it? Which came first: the ability to remember 7 digits, or the decision to make phone numbers 7 digits long? It seems more likely that 7-digit phone numbers became common because that was t
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by o_nate 16y ago
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers by Paul Hoffman - a biography of mathematician Paul Erdos that also functions as an introduction to some of the more interesting puzzles of number theory.
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Essay contest: Is reality digital or analog?(fqxi.org)
6 points by o_nate 16y ago|1 comments
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by o_nate 16y ago
Some more contenders: 1. Benford's Law - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfords_law 2. Two envelopes problem - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_envelopes_problem