Really interesting! It does need an explanation - took me a bit of clicking around to discover the rules (which I actually enjoyed because it turned out not to be too complicated! But some will give up early).
One aspect I liked about the larger puzzle sizes it that the topology becomes nontrivial: you can work out for sure that a cell has to be marked without knowing the exact path from the edge inwards, which you later narrow down.
Feature request: can interior cells be marked? Right now it's disallowed which helps rule discovery but requires the user to remember more.
Yeah, I think it's a typo and should have been "one in every 24 million babies" - this makes sense given the numbers, with 4 million born every year but only a new president every 6 years.
If I understand you right - you could visualize in 2d space: "king" at origin, X-axis is "king"-"man", Y-axis is "king"-"woman" (or gram-schmidt if you really want orthogonal).
In 3d you can go one further and have the Z-axis be "king"-"queen" (or gram-schmidt again). The orthogonalized versions have the advantage that they give a closer notion of distance to what the underlying model sees. In the 2d case you will get exact distances except that it won't show how far off "queen" you are when you compute "king"-"man"+"woman". In the 3d case it should give exact distances.
Edit to add: With the 2d version you can maybe do some more stuff. IIRC "queen" is chosen as it's the word with the closest embedding to X="king"-"man"+"woman". You can put the next few closest words on the 2d chart as well, each labeled with the orthogonal distance from the 2d plane. So then "queen" should be the word with the smallest (squared distance from X) + (squared orthogonal distance from plane), which you might be able to eyeball.
Would you be interested in working in quantitative finance in London? We're hiring (remotely for now, but you'd be expected to work in London probably later this year).
We have lots of PhDs (physics, maths, etc - not exclusively though, I only have a master's in maths) and aren't particularly looking for a finance background, so you're pretty much a classic interview candidate. (Finance knowledge or interest is obviously a plus.) Interviews would be on a combination of general maths, stats, finance, ML and programming - whatever subset you're strongest in.
To sell the role a bit - we work on algorithmic trading, but I probably can't say too much more than that. I'm really enjoying working here, the environment's a lot like hanging out at uni with my nerdy friends and the work is interesting and free of bullshit. Project turnaround time is quick.
Please let me know if you'd be interested in hearing more about this. You can reach me at my_email@wauchope.net, but instead of my_email it's dax.
"Saying "selection pressure" implies intent, determination, a collective mission, if you will. Evolution has none of those drivers. It has no objectives. It sets no goals. And it certainly does not operate in some collective purpose driven form within a population."
danieltillett said:
"At the moment the speed of disease progression to death is so fast that it is slowing the spread of Ebola. If the Ebola took longer to kill it would infect more people."
This seems like a true statement and in line with your own opinion; I can't quite see what you are objecting to.
The death of the infected isn't necessarily the end of the virus.
It looks like a police officer inspecting the home of the guy who just died in Texas has now contracted ebola. As I understand it he inspected the home days after the patient had been in isolation at the hospital. Apparently there was vomit, fecal matter, blood and who knows what else in there. Why he went in there without protective gear is incomprehensible to me.
The point is that death isn't the end of the virus, it's the end of the host. That's why they are cremating the guy who just died.
The EPR paradox was resolved a while ago, strongly in favour of Einstein's "spooky action at a distance". The first experiments were done in the 70's. See:
Yes, but as with most things in physics, the first signs that an idea is dead usually come decades before the ghost is truly given up. Take, for example, this work from 2012 that was still dealing with a variation on the "hidden variables" formulation: http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/10/quantum-entanglement-...
A theory is (as Heisenberg explained in his book "Physics and Philosophy") an interpretation of data based upon unscientific, non-falsifiable, a priori assumptions on the part of the theorist. You can't really disprove something as nebulous as "hidden variables." That's not a falsifiable statement. What you can do is disprove some theory based on hidden variables. Such evidence does not apply to the possibility of other theories of hidden variables that are yet unformulated.
I thought it meant two programs which compute the same thing but possibly using different algorithms. If they are indistinguishable then you can't infer from the improved algorithm anything you can't get from the old one.
One aspect I liked about the larger puzzle sizes it that the topology becomes nontrivial: you can work out for sure that a cell has to be marked without knowing the exact path from the edge inwards, which you later narrow down.
Feature request: can interior cells be marked? Right now it's disallowed which helps rule discovery but requires the user to remember more.