The thing is I rarely see brief/cut short/docked/etc. as anything but removing the last letter - removing an arbitrary number of letters from the end would be unfair IMO
coop short for co-operative, meaning some sort of worker-owned thing? or as in chicken coop, meaning lots of people crammed into a small space doing boring things?
@boboquack if you happen to be around, is it just me or is the overall shape of the answer to your sudoku-janpu question "Alice won by doing X; here's a short and simple proof. Bob could have won by doing Y; here are multiple pages of analysis to prove it"? (I am of course still looking for more manageable ways to prove the second bit.)
@n_palum the point isn't the logical structure of it, which is clear enough, it's that one portion of the proof seems to require vast amounts of tedious case-checking.
Add all of the missing information to complete each set below. In the end, there must be no difference between your answer and mine.
{{ 0, 1, 5, 7, 27, 35, __, 67, 77, __},
{ 0, 1, __, 33, __, 63, 72, __, 84, __},
{ 0, 1, 4, __, 24, 30, __, 40, __, __},
{ 0, 1, 3, 9, 27, __, __...
The second ... well, even if I make the assumption (nowhere made explicit) that what A's saying is that at a certain point B could have won immediately the best I can do at the moment involves an awful lot of case-splitting and manual checking.
But I dare say I'm being dim.
(none of this is a request for help, you understand)
just to make sure I understand what is being asked for, though:
in the second part (i.e., how Bob could have won)
... hang on while I figure out how I want to word this ...
(sorry, trying to figure out how to express what I want to say (1) clearly, (2) without giving things away to readers who might want to solve the problem for themselves, and (3) maintaining as much generality as possible in case I have made some mistake about what the actual answer is)
you want a proof not merely that, say, "at some point Bob could have made move X and won" but more specifically that at a particular well-defined point in the game Bob could have made move X and won. And that there was not some other way in which Bob could have won to which Alice could have been referring. Right?
I just got the "guru" badge for having +40 or better on an accepted answer. The funny thing is that the answer in question is actually at +43. So either (1) whatever process checks for this does it really slowly or (2) I just got three upvotes on a really old answer in surprisingly rapid succession or (3) something more interesting happened, like mods purging sockpuppet accounts that had issued a lot of strange downvotes.
@boboquack Thanks. Will think more about how to simplify the proof, then.
I haven't actually checked all the hundreds of things that need checking but I'm pretty sure they would in fact check out :-).
I am, though, making the assumption I mentioned above, that A's statements are meant to be understood as "Bob, you could have done this and then I'd have had no legal moves" rather than "Bob, you could have done this, and then with best play on both sides you would have won the game in the end".
@Randal'Thor What is your field, if I may ask? Are you in academia or industry? Or for that matter retired or something of the sort? Feel free not to answer any of that for any reason, of course.
@boboquack Do you want to confirm or deny the assumption I mentioned above, about how A's statement is meant to be understood? It seems like it makes a big difference to the question...
I would ask more about your research but I guess you guard your (pseudo/ano)nymity jealously and would prefer not to say things that would make it possible to go looking for published papers and figure out who you are.
I left academia years ago for easier and more lucrative work in the local tech industry, but when I was doing research it was on circle packing. Not the Kepler-conjecture "how densely can you pack 'em?" sort of thing but something with interesting connections with [continues]
complex analysis, potential theory, random walks on graphs, and so forth.
It was kinda fun but also frustrating in that way pure maths research so often is, and after a few very unproductive postdoc years I decided to get out of academia and into what laughably claims to be the real world.
@GarethMcCaughan Are you finding that PSE scratches your mathematical itch, or are the puzzles here not advanced enough compared to what you used to do?
Personally I'd compare the PSE maths puzzles more to Olympiad-type stuff than research-level maths.
Yeah, I agree. Fortunately, Olympiad-type stuff is more fun (though less satisfying in the best case where everything goes well) than proper research-level maths. PSE puzzles tend to be somewhat sub-Olympiad in difficulty, but I get a reasonable amount of mathematical itch-scratching from other things.
Oh, speaking of analysis, I have to ask the following ridiculous question (which I will explain when you have answered it). When you eat corn on the cob, in what pattern do you generally process it? I mean, do you work along the length of it, or around in circles about its axis, or something else?
The question is this: When Alice says "See, if you went there instead of there", should I understand the end of the sentence to be "... you would have had a forced win" or "... you would have immediately won because at that point I'd have had no legal move"? For the avoidance of doubt, I understand that the latter is true; the question is whether it's what Alice was saying.
(is the distinction clear?)
incidentally, as OP do you think I should or shouldn't post a partial answer saying what I believe the relevant moves are but that I haven't yet found a not-ridiculously-painful way to organize the proof of the second part?
@boboquack I have made what I hope is a clarifying but not a clunkifying edit.
oooooh
I think I have made a wrong assumption, which (1) means my conjectured answer isn't quite right and (2) may make it less awful to prove that the actual answer is right.
so @boboquack it now looks to me as if the situation is as follows: That Square on the west edge of the board will be available for Bob to move to and win, whenever Alice goes "next" to it for the last time. But there are lots of different ways for the game to go, which result in that happening at different times and with a different last square.
That feels like less specificity than I thought you were looking for -- but it also looks to me as if anything more specific will necessarily be wrong.
But I'm probably just confused. It's nearly 4am local time and I should be asleep.
@GarethMcCaughan Oh, sorry, I see we've had a miscommunication.
What I meant to say, is that in any game, there is a point after which Bob can win (jura Nyvpr tbrf arkg gb vg sbe gur ynfg gvzr). I didn't mean that that point had to be after the nth move for some fixed n, or that Alice had to make a certain move before it.
That puzzle about coordinates on a sphere ... I can't help noticing that it's got a lot about "jumping" in it and that it talks about things being "trivially stupid". Are there marsupials involved and if so should we be worried?
The one with the toys? Yeah, I've seen it, but have only looked at it briefly.
The solution is obvious, though: These aren't radishes, but _horse_radishes, so you have to make a knight tour through the grid. Should be a piece of cake! :)
Source:
gpuzzles.com
Mr. Devil was going to a family party on his new car. It's was a fine ride but after traveling for 2 hours, the car gets a puncture. It took Mr. Devil 10 minutes to change the tire. The remaining journey Mr. Devils travels ar 30km/hr.
Mr devil reaches party 30 minutes late....
Rules :
Fill with numbers from 1 to 13, and each number can appear max 4 times.
Small numbers between 2 cell shows the difference between the cells.
A + D = B + C
Example :
(In this example, I fill with numbers from 1 to 8, and each number appear max 2 times)
Solve This :
Have fun with my self-made Sudoku puzzle.
Solve this Sudoku puzzle using the standard Sudoku rules:
Fill any row, column and bold-framed area with the numbers 1 to 9.
Hint: It is not as difficult as it might look!
actually it occurs to me that it's generally OK to apply end-removing operations to a word indicated only indirectly, so I could have replaced "ejection" with "emission" or something which would have been funnier. Oh well.
Go through the labyrinth by exchanging yellow and green circles. The enter is the yellow circle on the left-bottom and the exit is the green circle in the middle-bottom (as shown with the arrows).
You can go through one circle more than once.
Okay, my ideas so far on the CCCC. Maybe someone can take some inspiration, Black=Dark. Dark without a= Drk. Then, put a 5 letter synonym of Curmudgeon in that and we could get a word meaning SCRATCH. So far, I have got precisely nothing.
This is one of those grid puzzles that I simply cannot fix. Also, can these be solved without constructing the grid? Or is the grid method the simplest? Here is the puzzle:
One of the most popular features of the children's TV show Pumpernickel Place is the antics of the Floppies, especially the...
We start with
1=850-4-3 as the cotton swab equation, incorrect of course.
By moving 3 swabs or less create a correct equation. It is a standard digital display. You may use numbers, roman numerals or letters in standard digital display. If you use roman numerals, 1 willl have 2 swabs, C will ha...
People are just using both interchangeably, and I can see why - from the excerpts, they actually sound pretty similar, even though in fact they're completely different types of puzzle.
Add all of the missing information to complete each set below. In the end, there must be no difference between your answer and mine.
{{ 0, 1, 5, 7, 27, 35, __, 67, 77, __},
{ 0, 1, __, 33, __, 63, 72, __, 84, __},
{ 0, 1, 4, __, 24, 30, __, 40, __, __},
{ 0, 1, 3, 9, 27, __, __...
Source:
gpuzzles.com
Mr. Devil was going to a family party on his new car. It's was a fine ride but after traveling for 2 hours, the car gets a puncture. It took Mr. Devil 10 minutes to change the tire. The remaining journey Mr. Devils travels ar 30km/hr.
Mr devil reaches party 30 minutes late....
Have fun with my self-made Sudoku puzzle.
Solve this Sudoku puzzle using the standard Sudoku rules:
Fill any row, column and bold-framed area with the numbers 1 to 9.
Hint: It is not as difficult as it might look!
Go through the labyrinth by exchanging yellow and green circles. The enter is the yellow circle on the left-bottom and the exit is the green circle in the middle-bottom (as shown with the arrows).
You can go through one circle more than once.
We start with
1=850-4-3 as the cotton swab equation, incorrect of course.
By moving 3 swabs or less create a correct equation. It is a standard digital display. You may use numbers, roman numerals or letters in standard digital display. If you use roman numerals, 1 willl have 2 swabs, C will ha...
