Random Thoughts XII - Floccinaucinihilipilification

[Samson]

What is the one thing people on this forum won't argue about?

There is a good version of civ?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

, of course.

 

[Kyriakos]

Beautiful, no?
What you see is the actual distribution of primes (the ragged black line), compared to the (not that accurate) n/log n (blue) and the considerably more accurate logarithmic-based integral (red).

 

[Gelion]

Is it minutes over time?

 

[Kyriakos]

It's number of primes (y axis) over number of integers (x axis)

 

[Gelion]

Interesting and simple enough for me to understand

 

[Kyriakos]

Interesting and simple enough for me to understand

For everyone
Though indeed the good thing here is that it can be immediately picked up, instead of having to think about what it means.
I am getting interested in the book I am reading, about Riemann, and this is around the 1/3 mark of it.
A few pages later, the first important (actual) russian in this story is mentioned - someone called Pafnuty (so rare a first name that it could have belonged to a character by Gogol).

 

[Gelion]

I am getting interested in the book I am reading, about Riemann, and this is around the 1/3 mark of it.
A few pages later, the first important (actual) russian in this story is mentioned - someone called Pafnuty (so rare a first name that it could have belonged to a character by Gogol).

Actually no, its even weirder

 

[Valka D'Ur]

What is the one thing people on this forum won't argue about?

This question prompted an answer summed up in a picture:

 

[Takhisis]

What is the one thing people on this forum won't argue about?

I can't think of anything at least two people on this forum won't argue about.

Apolyton is our enemy and must be destroyed.

 

[Broken_Erika]

Apolyton is our enemy and must be destroyed.

It practically already is..........

 

[Takhisis]

Summon Masinissa.

 

[Takhisis]

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Apolyton is our enemy and must be destroyed.

The last time I peeked in there, it was to see how many decades it's been that Berzerker has been insisting on that stuff he insists on and people have been either refuting it or opting out of paying attention.

 

[Kaitzilla]

Apolyton is our enemy and must be destroyed.

Whoa, Rah had like 34000 posts.

Wait, are all of you arguing in Apolyton Off Topic too?!

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Whoa, Rah had like 34000 posts.

Wait, are all of you arguing in Apolyton Off Topic too?!

I'm not. I don't find that place to my liking.

 

[tjs282]

It must be a solvable problem, if you play optimally what is your chance of winning?

What you're forgetting is that you can consider 4 attempts with 5 different letters each time as a single go of 20/26. Also when you then consider that many letters are more common than others, your chances increase dramatically. With 4 attempts you can test all the vowels, which guarantees you that you're going to have at least one hit. You also can know which types of letter combinations generally work together. Remember that this is a word puzzle, not a mathematics puzzle.

The game takes 5 minutes to play.

Your math here incorrectly assumes you're trying to match a full string of 5 random letters. This is an error.

I don't mean that you'll match the word in 4 guesses. I'm saying that in 4 guesses, you can attempt to match 20 out of 26 letters.

The mathematics involved here would be the commonality of letters appearing in words, to strategically arrange your guesses to have the most popular letters first.

@Samson, while you can certainly brute-force it, a solution can be approached quickly by playing optimally. Since every guess has to be a real word, and all results from previous attempts inform the next guess, the probability-space reduces very fast.

I just had a go, based on Mary's advice above, and treating the puzzle as an anagram, I reached today's solution in 3 attempts.

Spoiler The puzzle's up for another 11 hours, so... :

I tried "A S T E R" as my first guess — the first word I could think of including A, S, T, E, and R, (some of) the most commonly used letters in English.

This showed that A, S, and R were part of the word, but all in the wrong place.

So my next guess was "R A I D S", which changes the position of all 3 known letters (e.g. "H A R M S" would have been another possibility).

This gave me a D as well, but all 4 known letters still wrongly placed.

So looking at the "S" position, I now know that my solution can be:

S _ _ _ _
or
_ _ S _ _
or
_ _ _ S _

... plus A, D, R, and [?] — but not E or I or T.

So my next attempt was "S H A R D" — and that was correct.

 

[EgonSpengler]

That's fantastic. I need to remember that.

 

[Broken_Erika]

Whoa, Rah had like 34000 posts.

Wait, are all of you arguing in Apolyton Off Topic too?!

I believe that Rah's brother is Ming, an admin there.

 

[Kyriakos]

I don't get Itchio sales. It seems pretty random - although I really do next to no advertising, by which I mean not even free by posting about it on social sites (wouldn't make sense to have paid ads for one item anyway). Just got someone who bought the item, which was priced at $7, but decided to tip another $7.
Maybe they just liked it so much that they thought it was fair. +$7 hardly is monumental, but they had no obligation to tip.

Not quite as random as the previous tip of $45, but that was really extreme. I suppose this one actually plans to use the graphics in some game.

By now it has been bought 6 times (21 for a smaller linked item), with a total revenue of roughly $200. Was uploaded to Itch 5 months ago. Maybe if I had 5 such items it might be (assuming they worked together) up to $200/month, which is ok for this sort of thing.