I've know about tetration and the Ackermann function - here's a practical sounding problem that gets into the really big numbers.
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It’s not often that 5-year-olds can grasp questions at the frontiers of computer science, but it can happen. Suppose, for instance, that a kindergartner named Alice has two apples, but she prefers oranges. Fortunately, her classmates have developed a healthy fruit-trading system with strictly enforced exchange rates: Give up an apple, say, and you can get a banana. Can Alice execute a series of trades, by picking up and offloading bananas or cantaloupes, that gets her to her favorite fruit?
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new ways to tie ties
Not something I worry about = at least not sartorially, but hey... Someone has to do it.
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Soon, Mocka found an online community devoted to tie knots. He discovered knots like the Merovingian, which was named for a character in the 2003 film “The Matrix Reloaded”; it’s unusual because the tail is knotted in front of the blade, as though the tie is wearing a smaller tie. On YouTube, he started following tievangelists like Patrick Novotny, a Canadian realtor who wears uncommon tie knots to stand out while networking. Mocka ultimately created more than a thousand videos of his own. He established or articulated dozens of basic techniques: twisting, swirling, spiralling, tunnelling, snaking, flaring. He’d sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with a new idea, and rouse his sleeping wife by crying, “I got it!”
In the small world of tie-tying, Mocka became a minor celebrity. One prolific knot designer, a South African court interpreter named Mabu Letsoalo, called him a genius and a major influence on him. Novotny, whose tie-themed YouTube videos have more than twenty million views, told me, “I think everybody in the tie community could probably look toward Boris for inventing the most knots.” This is a surprisingly difficult thing to adjudicate, however. Mocka said that he reached out to Guinness World Records, but the organization said that a record would be too hard to establish; all of its records must be measurable, breakable, standardizable, and verifiable. Ties raise questions. Is any knot in a tie a tie knot, or are there rules? Can you turn an old knot into a new knot simply by adding a twist or a loop? When you combine two knots, do they become one? These are not just aesthetic questions—they’re math problems, too.
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05:12 in General Commentary, math | Permalink | Comments (0)