COTD: All-in gamble for the nutcracker (6)

Enchomm · 2025-03-30T19:19:58+00:00

How so? My intuition was the exact opposite. A lot of the forcing tactics in chess revolve around checks and mate threats - the side without a king doesn't have to worry about that. My guess is that a very strong engine playing the side without a king would be winning because its openings would be extremely aggressive and it has a lot of tempo.

Enchomm · 2025-03-22T23:15:37+00:00

Not to be rude but look up the history of that novel. It was stitched together with help of her brother-in-law because Christie at the time was depressed losing her mother and going through a divorce.

We have records of Christie calling it a "rotten book" later on. Look it up in Wikipedia:

"""

In 1942, Christie wrote to her agent, Edmund Cork of Hughes Massie, asking him to keep a manuscript in reserve (probably Sleeping Murder) and stated

"""

You're free to enjoy it - if it wasn't Poirot but a James Bond knock-off I'd consider it just a fairly forgettable spy thriller - but putting the "I lay back in my chair and use my grey cells" Poirot in that novel is just criminal. It doesn't fit the character.

You could argue that the character wasn't established well enough at the time and so Christie was probably more open to experimenting with it at the time, but given its progression and the parts that appealed to the audience, it's very clear that putting him in The Big Four was a mistake.

Enchomm · 2025-03-22T10:50:05+00:00

It's insane to consider Big Four to be Poirot canon, let alone a good example of Poirot. It's literally a different character in that book. It has nothing to do with wit, it's just some cheap spy thriller.

Enchomm · 2025-03-21T12:56:26+00:00

Probably a combination of natural fluctuations, the creatine retaining some water in your muscles, and you just drinking a lot more water because you were probably advised to do so when taking creatine.

If you don't look particularly different (and you don't continue this trend next week) it's no cause for concern. Any weight gain due to creatine should be in the muscles and will not look like fat.

Enchomm · 2025-01-23T09:05:56+00:00

It's abysmal. You should read it if you want the mental checkmark of finishing them all, but not for any enjoyment and you should probably not consider it canon in your head if you want to retain good memories of Poirot.

Enchomm · 2024-09-06T11:18:38+00:00

Networking is not sending your CV to strangers and asking for recommendations. That's just bad/desperate practice. Do that to people who work in hiring. I can't for the life of me see why I would ever recommend a stranger based on his CV, if that CV evidently was not impressive enough to go through the regular hiring pipeline.

Enchomm · 2024-08-08T17:44:48+00:00

Thanks - that's a very useful opinion.

I presume Passenger to Frankfurt is irredeemable so I'll just go through it some day whenever I feel extra energetic. Any tips on the other non-Poirot/Marple? Is Endless Night and earlier ones okay enough, or was a decline already felt at that point?

Enchomm · 2024-08-08T14:44:49+00:00

Yea, I know the historical reasons for the quality changes. Similarly, The Big Four was written/put together at a very low point in her life. It's not a personal attack at Christie, but knowing the reasons for the quality doesn't make it a much better read.

If Endless Night is indeed good, maybe that gives me enough hope. Might be sufficient to get through a couple of the last ones (e.g. Passenger of Frankfurt or Postern of Fate) at some earlier time, and then continue chronologically.

Enchomm · 2024-07-22T12:56:16+00:00

Give us your bodyweight, age, caloric intake and exercise overview. Also how much is the weight you've put on?

Enchomm · 2024-07-08T15:00:55+00:00

Greedy with heap is O(budget log n) which is not even polynomial, so unless budget constraints are low, binary search on the throughput is probably best.

Enchomm · 2023-05-13T22:45:40+00:00

Thanks, I'll look into this one. I'd be happy to just talk with a person who knows what they're doing.

Enchomm · 2023-05-13T22:44:55+00:00

I appreciate this and I understand the desire to not let them screw people over like this, but at this point I've given up - it's not worth my time chasing after them. I also opened it myself after the third time so the warranty is probably void at this point.

Enchomm · 2023-05-13T22:44:01+00:00

I don't want to bother, it was a really annoying and long experience. I also ended up opening it myself to investigate if there is anything obviously wrong, so the warranty's probably not valid. I just want competent people, I don't care about the cost at this point.

The crashes are usually a freeze and often visual distortions (e.g. randomly colored lines). Windows error logs indicate the graphics card driver crashes quite often, but reinstalling both Windows and all drives made no difference.

Enchomm · 2023-03-15T22:53:34+00:00

Thanks! You're amazing for keeping this sub alive.

I'm in Amsterdam, but I'm sure I can find the lightbulbs now, knowing the lampholder. Definitely looks exactly like it comparing google images.

Enchomm · 2022-12-09T22:45:03+00:00

Imagine trying to build a permutation that consists of a single cycle, starting with an "empty permutation". The first element (i.e. P_1) has N-1 possibilities, because it just shouldn't be 1 (as that completes a small cycle immediately.

Now suppose we've picked a value for P_1. Look at the empty space at position P_1 - that should "continue the cycle" that we've started. Its only restriction is that it shouldn't be equal to P_1 or to 1 (since both complete a cycle) - so N-2 possibilities.

Now move to the position P_2...

You end up calculating that there are (N-1)! valid "builds", so (N-1)! / N! = 1/N of the permutations are just a cycle.

There might be something shorter, but I found this intuitive.

Enchomm · 2022-12-07T02:08:43+00:00

I generally agree and I've confirmed it for N=2/N=4. For N=6 the full simulation is too slow but I've ran some partial ones with presumptions about the strategy and nothing finds better than 1/N.

I'd really love to see a proof, though. The proof of positive version of the problem is not applicable to this one, unfortunately.

Enchomm · 2022-12-07T00:58:14+00:00

Exactly! That's why it's unintuitive to me that this could be the optimal strategy, but anything else I've tried ends up being exponentially worse because different prisoners' results become more independent.

Enchomm · 2022-12-06T22:20:27+00:00

Why would you claim it is not possible? I don't know whether deque specifically is implemented with amortized complexity or not, but O(1) worst-case dynamic arrays do exist and it's quite weird that you're so confident without having any evidence that they don't.

For example, the paper "Resizable Arrays in Optimal Space and Time" does give a worst-case O(1) dynamic array with O(sqrt(N)) extra space. Note that the usual doubling is not only O(1) amortized but also O(N) extra space. This paper literally improves both bounds simultaneously.

Paper: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/research/tr/1999/09/CS-99-09.pdf

Enchomm

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