LESSWRONG
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Waxwing
2020
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Sleep math: red clay blue clay
Waxwing4y10

Having checked this, you're totally correct. 

Here's a short Python program that checks this empirically.  

import numpy as np

n = 100

b = np.zeros(n)
r = np.ones(n)

for ib in range(n):
   for ir in range(n):
       old_b = b[ib]
       old_r = r[ir]
       new_b = new_r = np.mean([old_b,old_r])
       r[ir] = new_r
       b[ib] = new_b

print(np.mean(b))

A graph of the scaling of the max blue temperature with respect to number of divisions is here: 

https://imgur.com/a/r4hdaJD

When T is 1000 you can get the blue to 0.98 of what red was initially... so I imagine in the infinite limit you can get all the way there.

This seemed weird to me, so I looked at the final temperature distribution of all of the n blue blobs, as n increases.  I've plotted them here (blue lines have n being small; red lines have n being big). You can see that as the number of blobs becomes very big, the fraction which have temperature less than 1 falls... (i.e. knee of graph moves to the right...)

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Sleep math: red clay blue clay
Waxwing4y30

Treat the blue clay (mass 1, temperature T) as a single lump. Feed it infinitesimal lumps of red clay (mass dX, temperature TR). After each infinitesimal feeding, the temperature of the blue clay changes by

dT=T+TRdX1+dX−T=−TdX+TRdX

(Final equality comes from series expansion).

Then you can integrate: ∫Tfinal0dTTR−T=∫10dX.

i.e. log(TRTR−Tfinal)=1 

The final solution is:

Tfinal=TR⋅(1−1/e).

It's worth saying that this is the most efficient way to transfer energy from red to blue because each feeding step is thermodynamically reversible. 

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