Let’s play a simple statistics game. I’m looking at a normal distribution with unit variance (which you can’t see) and I’m going to randomly sample a point from it, which I’ll share with you. You’ll then guess the mean of the distribution. Let’s say the random sample has a value of 6. What would your …
While all logic puzzles defy intuition to some degree (hence their being “puzzles”), the Green Eyes one is among the few where the solution remains difficult to grasp even after it is known (at least for me). When I stumbled back across it recently, I spent a good hour thinking the answer must be wrong, …
Since I started lifting weights, I’ve found curious the lack of any heuristics to calculate a one rep max based on a particular number of sets and reps. A number of calculations exist for a single set (see below chart from Wikipedia), but as pretty much all programming involves both sets and reps (e.g., bench …
I recently came across the unexpected hanging paradox, and it’s been a surprisingly tricky one to work through. The paradox goes as follows (from Wikipedia): A judge tells a condemned prisoner that he will be hanged at noon on one weekday in the following week but that the execution will be a surprise to the prisoner. …
Mathematics is full of difficult problems, most of which correspondingly seem difficult to solve. However, within the domain of difficult problems also exist those that seem easy to solve, or at the very least, easy to understand. The P vs. NP problem may be the most famous problem in this category, but another interesting (and …
Throughout history, people have sought to identify accurate statements about the world, so as to better understand the state of our existence. In many domains, this is a difficult endeavor – the world is often messy and inexact, and does not lend itself to easy classification. However, certain simplified domains have yielded more easily; particularly …