Thomas Sepulchre

Sorted by New

# Wiki Contributions

While work was required, any worker with the right skills could have done it.

While money was required from someone, anyone’s money would have sufficed.

Switch any piece of the whole enterprise out for another, and as long as the pieces fulfill the same function, the enterprise still succeeds; remove the engineer, and the enterprise never happens in the first place.

I don't see why this is true. What if the skills are actually rare, such that the worker or workers cannot be replaced? What if the materials are also rare?

On the other hand, what if building a bridge there is fairly obvious, so much so that, if this specific engineer doesn't build it, instead of the entreprise never happening, it just happens one month later, the time for another engineer to randomly notice this bridge building opportunity?

You seem to arbitrarily separate between the character finding the idea - or, as you put it, having the vision - from all the other characters, and I neither see why nor believe that this particular character deserves that much credit.

(There is also a climate case to made in either direction, depending on where the marginal electricity is coming from, since often, as in Europe, the answer is ‘coal’ which is way worse than a gas stove.)

I don't believe this is true, that is, I don't believe that, in Europe, often, the marginal electricity is coming from coal. Of course this depends on what often means.

Digging into this question isn't easy, but I found a few things

• Coal produced about 15% of the electricity in the EU in 2020, and the trend is going down. This is obviously not an indication of the marginal electricity source.
• Within the EU, 13 of the 27 member states do not have a single coal plant.
• Even when coal plants are running, this doesn't mean that coal is the marginal source of electricity. Electricity from gas is more expensive, therefore whenever a gas plant is running, gas is the marginal source of electricity.
• I found this paper computing the marginal electricity source in Spain (see figure 2), between 2015 and 2021. Coal is the marginal source of electricity only a few percents of the time.
• I also found this paper computing the marginal electricity source in the EU as a whole in 2010 (see figure 1b). Back then, coal was the marginal source of electricity slightly below 60% of the time. Given that this was 13 years ago, this number must be lower now, how much though I don't know.

This doesn't undermine your points. Indeed:

• Coal is a dirty source of electricity, dirtier than gas and basically everything else.
• If we want to discuss the climate implications of gas stove vs electric stove, we should take into account the climate implications of the marginal production of electricity.
• If the marginal electricity source on the grid is gas, the advantage of using an electric stove isn't obvious.

One extra run because this one is interesting, this is another use of "regenerate response", nothing else changed

If the inputs to the gcd function are -3 and -5, the function will return -1.

Here's why:

1. The function first assigns a = -3 and b = -5.
2. The while loop begins, and b is not equal to 0, so the loop continues.
3. The values of a and b are swapped, and a becomes -5 and b becomes -3.
4. The loop continues, and b is not equal to 0, so the loop continues.
5. The values of a and b are swapped again, and a becomes -3 and b becomes -2.
6. The loop continues, and b is not equal to 0, so the loop continues.
7. The values of a and b are swapped again, and a becomes -2 and b becomes -1.
8. The loop continues, and b is not equal to 0, so the loop continues.
9. The values of a and b are swapped again, and a becomes -1 and b becomes -1.
10. The loop continues, and b is not equal to 0, so the loop continues.
11. The values of a and b are swapped again, and a becomes -1 and b becomes 0.
12. The loop continues, and b is equal to 0, so the loop terminates.
13. The function returns the value of a, which is -1.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions.

This answer is interesting, because it looks very correct. I'd like to point your attention to step 9. ChatGPT claims that, at some point, both a and b will be equal to -1, which actually nevers happens. Indeed, -2%-1 = 0

As Ustice claims below

It seems to run code about as well as I do in my head.

I ran a small experiment:

Write a python program to compute the gcd

Sure! Here is a simple program to compute the greatest common divisor (GCD) of two numbers using the Euclidean algorithm:

def gcd(a, b):
while b != 0:
a, b = b, a % b
return a

print(gcd(60, 48))  # should print 12

This program works by repeatedly applying the Euclidean algorithm, which states that the GCD of two numbers a and b is equal to the GCD of b and the remainder of a divided by b. The algorithm terminates when the remainder is zero, at which point the GCD is equal to the last value of b.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions.

What would be the output of this function if the inputs are -3 and -5?

If you pass negative numbers as inputs to the gcd function, the output will be the absolute value of the GCD of the absolute values of the input numbers. For example, if you call gcd(-3, -5), the function will compute the GCD of 3 and 5, which is 2, and return the absolute value of 2, which is also 2.

Here is the modified version of the gcd function that returns the absolute value of the GCD:

def gcd(a, b):
a = abs(a)
b = abs(b)
while b != 0:
a, b = b, a % b
return a

print(gcd(-3, -5))  # should print 2

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions.

This is very wrong. First of all, no, if you pass negative numbers as inputs to the gcd function, the output will not be the absolute value. Actually, in Python, a%b has the sign of b, therefore the first function returns -1 (you can try it). Also, the gcd of 3 and 5 or -3 and -5 is neither 2 nor -2.

So, ChatGPT doesn't secretely run the functions, maybe it should though.

I used regenerate response because this one seemed really bad, and ChatGPT sometimes correctly gives -1 as an answer, sometimes incorrectly 1, and, oddly, often 2 or -2.

I think that, if you use the base 2, the alt-complexity might be ill-defined

Assume that, for your function , there is some program , such that it computes , and you can add any string after  without changing the fact that it computes . For example, you could think that  finishes with some stopping sequence, such that anything after will be ignored

Then, assuming  is the length of , there are at least one program of length , 2 programs of length , and, in general  programs of length  computing f. Thus, the sum diverges

Unless I made a mistake, this hints that the choice of base is not neutral, and any choice below 2 (including 2) makes the definition ill-posed

Sorry for the late response

You're absolutely right, thank you, the inaccurate positioning of B has nothing to do with the probability for a snark not to be hunted

Looking at the code, my model is actually not really spot on, it just kind of looks similar to the real one. I also assume that the snarks can be split into species, each with specific waking-times, phenotypes and probability of being a snark, but, in details, both are actually quite different.

So yes, I built a different model, and got a different ranking of snarks, what was I expecting '^^

Thank you

I placed B as the safest snark, despite it being the 21st

In general, I completely missed the fact that the choice not to hunt a snark was very far from random, thus introducing a bias I neither noticed nor corrected for

My model was spot on, and yet, somehow, the results aren't very close to the truth, I'll have to think about what I did wrong. Anyhow, I liked the challenge a lot, thank you!

Also, the poem was amazing, thanks again for that!

So, how many species are there?

Hum, about 12 ? Probably at least 8, maybe up to 20, or even more, I don't really know

One interesting point, it looks like there is one species, the Goojam, (or maybe 2 Goojam species), which always attacks, while all other species never attack. I.e.  only contains ones and zeros. This is not something I anticipated, it appeared when running my code, but it makes sense, so this might confirm the approach

My submission

BPGYHQ should be the set of 6 letters minimizing the probability of death

The letters, in increasing order of danger, are BPGYHQTSVINRDMKLOJUACWXEF, with BPGYHQTSVINRDMKLOJUACW (without XEF) being the solution maximizing the expected return, at least according to my models

If this is true, the pareto frontier is exactly the set of prefixes of this word, but since one can only submit one word for the bonus task, I will submit BPGYHQTS, a word of length 8 with a very low probability of death

It is remarkable to see that I find similar results to Yonge, despite having wildly different approaches!