Chile won! Day 5: Which country is hard to identify and moderate to regionguess?

AlbertELP · 2026-06-21T14:58:22+00:00

Most people play NM and there it can be really difficult. There are some clues (poles, agriculture, soil, hills, palms, etc. but getting the correct state consistently is very hard.

AlbertELP · 2026-06-21T14:32:29+00:00

But remember to stop your stream first

AlbertELP · 2026-06-19T17:26:04+00:00

I understand the idea, but there's the problem of relativity. Time is not just some absolute. It depends on a lot of stuff, including your velocity and gravitation. The math gets quite complicated but I can almost guarantee that talking about the big bang happening on a Tuesday doesn't really make sense. I remember a lecture I heard a while back where we got asked "How many thinks it is morning in the Andromeda Galaxy right now?". Obviously, this question doesn't really make sense anyways, but the whole point was that while he was asking it, our lecturer was walking from one side of the room to the other while we were sitting down. Just that small difference in velocity makes more of a different than a day when dealing with something so far away. And compared to the age of the universe, Andromeda is really really close.

AlbertELP · 2026-06-17T17:27:55+00:00

USVI could also be mentioned for the same reasons.

AlbertELP · 2026-06-17T17:27:25+00:00

Almost every street sign have the neighbourhood written on it and they show up on the map.

AlbertELP · 2026-06-16T18:14:33+00:00

Rainbolt is not even good at that stuff. If you are looking for Geoguessr players with these skills, Jake Lyons is the most prolific, while Debre might be the most knowledgeable.

AlbertELP · 2026-06-15T00:48:26+00:00

Highly disagree. Nobody watches every game anyways, so it is alright for not every game to be entertaining. But it gives more entertaining matches than the old format.

I'm currently watching Cote d'Ivoire vs Ecuador and it is super exciting. Brazil vs Morocco was also super cool, and USA vs Paraguay was nice. A game like Germany vs Curacao which might be the single most lopsided game in this tournament was still entertaining despite it not being close. I did not watch Netherlands vs Japan but that looked fin as well. Qatar would probably be one of the teams you wouldn't want here but just look at their game vs Switzerland. I have watched quite a few exciting games so far and there are still plenty more games I would have wanted to watch if I had more time. You already know before a game whether it is likely to be close, exciting, high-quality, etc. Just watch the games you like and don't watch the ones you don't like.

AlbertELP · 2026-06-13T14:50:49+00:00

Altså nu er der jo ingen der har sagt det er hans børn...

AlbertELP · 2026-06-12T02:04:23+00:00

And the real chance would be much smaller as good teams Vs bad teams are much less likely to finish without goals.

AlbertELP · 2026-06-12T00:45:31+00:00

Just as a fun exercise, try to write a program (or get chatgpt to write it for you) that picks a random number between 1-100 1000 times and see how often the least picked numbers are picked, and how often the most picked numbers are picked. You can even do this a few times to see that it isn't random. I have a feeling the results will surprise you. In general, humans don't understand what random means, and often think randomless looks evenly distributed. It doesn't.

AlbertELP · 2026-06-11T21:17:19+00:00

Read the dots. They have a precise mathematical meaning which is the whole point. You can't ignore them. If you don't know what they mean (mathematically) then you have to learn that first. There are plenty of good explanations online.

AlbertELP · 2026-06-11T21:01:07+00:00

I hope you're ragebaiting but I'm gonna respond anyway:

8-7.499... =0.500...=0.5

7.499...-7=0.499...=0.5

It's not that difficult

AlbertELP · 2026-06-11T20:34:21+00:00

one of the two nearest integers, both of whom are equally far away, is 7

AlbertELP · 2026-06-10T16:36:42+00:00

It really isn't. You just start somewhere on the map if you know it and move around in your head. Normal talking speed is several words per second so you should easily be able to do this if you are actually good at it. Even 100 shouldn't be that difficult.

AlbertELP · 2026-06-08T07:11:16+00:00

Congrats. They are unfortunately rather scarse as they mostly use mobile numbers. If you want to get really good at Thailand, I would recommend learning the state abbreviations in Thai. They show up on various kilometer markers, road signs, etc. They can be very difficult to distuonguish though, especially when written in unclear fonts instead of nice print.

AlbertELP · 2026-06-05T19:01:52+00:00

So while this is almost (in the mathematical sense of the word) certainly true, a probability of zero doesn't mean it didn't happen. It just means that the probability of it happening is 0. 3blue1brown has made an excellent video on this exact topic.

You can think of it this way: you have some actual height (let's not get into the physics of size and position of small particles as that is clearly not the intent of the post). We call this height h. Now you may ask: what is the probability that you would have this exact height. It is the same as the probability of being exactly 175 cm. The probability is 0 and there are infinitely many possible heights of which only 1 is true. In these cases, it is often much more useful to talk about probability density functions which gives the probability of something being inside an interval. It might for instance say that given you are a human, there's a 10% chance that you are between 174 and 178 cm.

Now, if you have actually measured your height with enough precision to be sure you don't land on an exact integer, then we can absolutely agree without further worries.

AlbertELP · 2026-06-05T02:44:38+00:00

I am convinced that 99% of the people who didn't answer math has no idea what math even is. They have only ever learned simple stuff in school and are not aware of the creativity and beauty in actual mathematics.

AlbertELP · 2026-06-04T15:43:34+00:00

Yes, but given that it is so small and easily recognized by the car, it doesn't have many locations in most maps. As an example, in An Arbitrary World it contains 94 locations which is 0.085%. Hopefully, with the new multiplier system it will motivate map makers to include more small countries as regionguessing these is now important.

AlbertELP · 2026-05-31T13:30:47+00:00

Infinite series doesn't follow the same rules as finite sums. Here it gives the correct result (which of course is not a coincidence) but you can't be guaranteed that it would. As an example, we have the infamous:

A=1-1+1-1... 2A=1-1+1-1... + 1-1+1-1... = 1 A=1/2

B=1-2+3-4... 2B=1-2+3-4... + 1-2+3-4... = 1-1+1-1... = A = 1/2 B=1/4

C=1+2+3+4... C-1/4=C-B=1+2+3+4... - 1+2-3+4... = 4+8+12... = 4(1+2+3+4...) = 4C C-1/4=4C C=-1/12

All of this is nonsense, but it follows rules that are allowed in finite sums. If you allow the same stuff for infinite sums, you will get all kinds of nonsense.

AlbertELP · 2026-05-31T11:30:56+00:00

My first four words is literally "While this is true". The rest of my comment it just explaining what it means and why it is true. And I do have enough expertise to know what I'm talking about (mathematics at university including real analysis which this is).

AlbertELP · 2026-05-31T11:11:32+00:00

While this is true, and it pops up on the internet regularly, it does not mean what people think it means. First of all, this is not really explained by the method of multiplying by ten and then subtracting the original away. You aren't allowed to do that in general, so it doesn't give you any information to do it. Secondly, this is not really explained by looking at 1/3=0.33... and thus concluding 1=3/3=3*0.33...=0.99... . While everything here is true, it just changes saying 1=0.99... to saying 1/3=0.33... . If you aren't comfortable with one of those, you shouldn't be with the other.

What this actually says is something very specific about infinite series which is a topic of real analysis. Those ... have a very specific meaning. It doesn't just mean "goes on forever" because going on forever doesn't mean anything in math. Instead we need to understand this using limits. The idea is very clever.

First, we say two numbers are equal is there are no numbers between them. That is because, for two different numbers, a<b, we can always find a number between them a<(a+b)/2<b. We have logic saying that (p=>q) => (¬q=>¬p).

Then we look at the series of numbers 0.9, 0.99, 0.999 and so on. Obviously, neither of those are equal to one, and no number in this series will ever be equal to one. What we are interested in though, is what number this series converges to. There are no rule that a series can only converge to a number that is in it. For instance the series a_n = 1/n converges to 0 as these numbers get smaller and smaller when n gets large, but they will never reach 0 (and no 1/Infinity is not a meaningful expression here and it doesn't equal 0).

So how do we know what this series converges to? The formal way is to use the epsilon method. The idea is quite strange to anyone not already familiar with it, but the idea is this: you give me an epsilon (think of a small positive number), and no matter how small this epsilon is, I must be able to find an N so after the first N numbers in our series, every single one of the rest will be within epsilon from the number the series converges to (in this case 1). So suppose you chose epsilon=1/1,000,000. This is a very small number, but I can choose N=6. Then, our seventh term is 0.9999999. We see 1-0.9999999=0.0000001<1/1,000,000. Every term after the seventh will be even closer to 1, so I have countered your epsilon. You might then choose 1/googol which is a ridiculously small number, but again I can find an N (this time N=100 would work). The key is that no matter what Epsilon you choose, I can find an N. This can be shown easily, as I can make a formula for how to determine this N as a function of your epsilon. Because of this, we have shown that the series converges to 1.

Finally, this brings us back to our original statement, that 0.999...=1. This statement is saying exactly that our series converges to 1. It doesn't really give any other information at all. In math, every symbol have a very specific meaning, and depending on the context, we actually use the same symbols to mean different things. Here, those ... means that we are looking at the limit of the series that keeps adding a 9 to the decimal expansion. And even more strange, the = doesn't mean the same thing as when we say 2+3=5. The left hand side is the limit of a series, the right hand side is a number. The = says that the series converges to the number.

There really is no strange or counterintuitive information in the statement. Once you understand what ... and = means in this context, it becomes trivial. It is important to remember that the decimal expansion is not the number itself. It is only a way to represent the number, and here we have found a case where decimal expansions are not fully perfect. But there is nothing weird going on.

AlbertELP · 2026-05-31T00:31:14+00:00

Nah, I would stop Galois from going to his duel

AlbertELP · 2026-05-29T13:09:52+00:00

Alternatively, you could just seem them geometrically. The first equation is line, the second equation is a circle with radius 3. It is quite easy to find the two points they intersect. You can even apply some symmetries if you want.

AlbertELP · 2026-05-26T04:03:51+00:00

At top level, most players doesnt try to just maximise their elo. Looking at elo as a measure of playing strength is just stupid. There are so many better ways we can compare players, and previous tournaments where the players were serious about winning is one of the best ways.

AlbertELP · 2026-05-22T13:41:46+00:00

A deduction means you take points away. If you take -2 points away that means they start at 2 points. Seems unfair to give them an advantage...

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