Yes, a strategy does exist which can force at least one line in a well of width 10 (and different strategies for 4, 6 and 8). I did a tedious brute-force calculation which demonstrated this a few years back. The code is not particularly presentable and the calculation takes about 11 days on a modern machine (it runs in a single thread), but here: https://github.com/qntm/tetris
The limiting factor is headroom (the depth of the well). For wells of depth 0, 1 and 2, the AI clearly wins, but once the depth increases enough a strategy becomes possible. My belief is that such a strategy exists for all even well widths, although proving this is annoyingly hard.
Hi, thanks a lot for pointing this out to me! However https://qntm.org/tetris#sec6 does not have any cases for width 10 where the player wins. Are you implying that you have run more calculations than described in this article, and that the player can win for width 10 with a sufficient high depth?
I find one of the most fascinating questions about constructing an escape room is how exactly you calibrate the difficulty for different groups of people. Some people will finish the room in 30 minutes like you, but others will be totally stumped after 50 minutes despite it being the exact same room.
Both of the rooms I've done had a hints system so a staff member overseeing the game through cameras could send a hint any time we dropped significantly behind schedule.
One of them had a two-room system where you had to solve the first room to get to the second room, and in the second room I believe one or two of the locks had been unlocked ahead of time manually by a staff member, based on how quickly we solved the first room.
Of course every time anybody takes the challenge you acquire more data, and keeping an eye on the emerging patterns must be absolutely critical to engineer an enjoyable challenge for the maximum number of different people. Metrics!
I have seen lots of posts where he explains things patiently in a lot of detail.
I just wonder if he gets the same tough treatment he gives to others when he is wrong. And if he takes it well. I am assuming that sometimes like most of us he is totally wrong.
FWIW he created (one of?) the worlds most used OS kernels and shared it freely sparking all kinds of projects and businesses.
As for the rudeness, I feel that is hugely overrated. Compare hime to someone like the "developer evangelist" who got two developers fired because they said something to each other that s/he didn't like and see what I mean.
Edit: comments welcome, I have enough points but I cannot learn what mistake I made if nobody tells me.
And doing so in a way that paints it in the most favorable possible light for one position, in addition to using technical skill as a free pass for them making personal attacks.
If you're puzzled about the implementation, I invite you to inspect the JavaScript code! And if you disagree with my implementation, I'd be interested to know what you would do differently.
My statement was conceptual. Boolos himself suggests that we ask if X is random to get to a solution (though in a more complex iff statement). But being able to ask if a source is random seems unreasonable, though without that capability I can't say if there is a solution.
This is a question of implementation, and answering it was part of the reason why I implemented this problem in the form of a computer program in the first place. In this implementation, the True and False gods simply pose the question to Random and take Random's answer - which is random. If you then ask the same question of Random again, of course you may not get the same answer.
> He proudly announces that there are ‘no fewer than 147 Indian dialects’ – a pathetically inaccurate count. (Today, India has 57 non-endangered and 172 endangered languages, each with multiple dialects – not even counting the many more that have died out in the century since My Fair Lady took place)
So, how many were there really? At the time, I mean.
I believe the number of "dialects" named in My Fair Lady can be largely explained by the lack of clear distinction between language and dialect over the years. From [1]:
"There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing a language from a dialect. A number of rough measures exist, sometimes leading to contradictory results. The distinction is therefore subjective and depends on the user's frame of reference."
Getting upset about Henry Higgins's estimation of the number of Indian "dialects" in a play from many decades ago doesn't make sense to me. His character was deliberately portrayed as a regressive lout, and terminology has surely changed in the intervening years.
I think the numbers are somewhat disputed. The People's Linguistic Survey of India says there are at least 780, with ~220 having died out in the last half century.[1] The Anthropological Survey of India reported 325 languages.[2]
The discrepancies are made particularly tricky because of the somewhat ambiguous distinction between languages and dialects.
I'm not an anthropological linguist, so I can't say with any authority. I only listed two figures there, but there are many more disputed figures.[1] There are a lot of difficulties classifying languages in India because the line between language and dialect can be tricky to pin down.
The meanings of "language" and "dialect" are surprisingly tied up in politics. Aside from what various folks in India speak, consider...
In China, too, we say that people in different regions speak different dialects: the national standard Mandarin; Shanghainese; Cantonese; Taiwanese; Fukanese; and others. Someone who speaks only one of these languages will be entirely unable to speak to someone who speaks only a different one. I'm friends with a couple, the guy being from Hong Kong and the girl being from Shanghai; at home, their common tongue is English. So in what way can these different ways of speaking be considered mere dialects?
But on the other side of the coin, there are the languages of Sweden and Norway. We like to call these different languages, but a speaker of one language can readily communicate with a speaker of the other. Wouldn't these be better considered dialects of the same language? I was recently on vacation in Mexico, and at the resort there was a member of the entertainment staff who came from South Africa, a native speaker of Afrikaans. She told me that she recently helped out some guests who came from Dutch, and spoke poor English (which is usually the lingua franca when traveling). Apparently Afrikaans and Dutch are so close that she was able to translate Spanish or English into Afrikaans for them, and they were able to understand that through skills in Dutch. Again, Afrikaans and Dutch seem to be dialects of the same language (and, I think, Flemish as well).
I think the answer is that language is commonly used as a proxy for, or excuse for, dividing nations. So if you want to claim that China is all one nation, you have to claim that those different ways of speaking are just dialects of the same language. Conversely, to claim separate national identities for Norwegians and Swedes, we have to say that those are different languages.
The limiting factor is headroom (the depth of the well). For wells of depth 0, 1 and 2, the AI clearly wins, but once the depth increases enough a strategy becomes possible. My belief is that such a strategy exists for all even well widths, although proving this is annoyingly hard.