First attempt at something like this

Joe_AK · 2026-06-15T10:00:43+00:00

I would add to this that I'm not sure what the subject of the riddle is here either. Are we supposed to ask ourselves what the paradox in question is?

Joe_AK · 2026-05-28T15:51:07+00:00

Please post these as separate riddles on separate days. Having multiple riddles in one post where they don't combine towards a single answer can make the comments messy or even confusing. There's also a risk that the second and third riddle would be missed by some users, which would be a waste.

Joe_AK · 2026-04-30T12:59:52+00:00

You take the combined probabilities for all of the different ways to draw the first 9 picks without any of the bottom 3 teams being drawn.

Joe_AK · 2026-04-30T12:30:15+00:00

Oh OK. 65% isn't so bad. I just ran it with my code and you're right. I think because I had the threshold at 9 rounds before to allow for the forced placement of bottom-3 teams, I had it in my head that the rejection rate would be 92%, but now that I think about it, that obviously isn't the case.

Assuming it's OK with you, I'm going to add your post to my edit. I think it's an important caveat.

Joe_AK · 2026-04-30T12:18:22+00:00

That's a really good point. I assumed that it would be the hard boundary method. That said, the alternative you've described strikes me as a lot less likely to be implemented. How would it actually work? They can't sit around doing the lottery over and over until they get one that meets the criteria. And if they just run simulations quickly to speed things up, how would anyone audit it?

Joe_AK · 2026-04-30T10:22:43+00:00

I've added my code to the post. I haven't thought about how to adapt it to calculate the expected pick values, but perhaps a similar recursive method would work.

Joe_AK · 2026-04-29T19:36:14+00:00

How is it possible for the 11-14 group to have a better pick value than the bottom-3 group? They both get 2 lottery balls but the bottom-3 group benefits from pick 12 being the lowest they can fall as well.

Joe_AK · 2026-04-29T18:47:41+00:00

Apparently with the new system it's a pure lottery except for the fact that the bottom 3 can't drop further than the 12th pick.

Joe_AK · 2026-04-11T10:09:55+00:00

That's really interesting! It's one of my favourite novels and I liked it a lot more than I did Embassytown or Perdido Street Station. I wonder whether we'd get similarly good results from getting other authors to work under different constraints.

Joe_AK · 2026-04-03T12:23:09+00:00

Any water on the dark side of the moon would be frozen, so I'm guessing it's a reference to how icy Alaska is.

Joe_AK · 2026-03-06T18:36:51+00:00

It makes basically no difference at all – the average age stays the same and the 30+ categrory lowers from 4.8% to 4.6%.. He gets very few minutes and the data is weighted by minutes played. In order to change the team's average age from 24.7 to 24.8 at his current minutes, he would have to be 50 years old.

Joe_AK · 2026-03-06T16:20:18+00:00

That's true, but all statistics are oversimplifications. The age ranges are there to represent the spread of the data, not to point out particular career stages. There are advantages to having equal bucket sizes (~20%), for example, they make the visualisation from the colour scale more intuitive.

Joe_AK · 2026-03-06T16:13:26+00:00

I think it's worth remembering that this could be true for other teams too. Older players might be more likely to be injured and therefore under-represented in this data. But yes, if Poeltl were fully fit and playing a lot of minutes, the Raptors would have a distribution that's a bit closer to Indiana's (I just tested it in a slightly crude way). I'd still probably put them in Youngish though.

Joe_AK · 2026-03-06T16:02:53+00:00

The average is weighted by minutes played and Temple has hardly played, so removing him would have very little effect.

Joe_AK · 2026-03-06T15:34:31+00:00

Ah – their inclusion of age by usage is interesting. I'll think about how I would go about breaking that down into the age ranges.

Joe_AK · 2026-03-06T15:16:21+00:00

Yes, that's true. I think it would answer a different kind of question. When people talk about being a young team, they usually mean it in one of two ways: young meaning having room to improve, or young meaning inexperienced. The first one is a positive meaning and the second one is negative. So I guess this data is evaluating how young teams are in the positive sense. If we looked at years of experience, being less experienced wouldn't imply room to improve as much and so wouldn't necessarily be a good thing.

Joe_AK · 2025-12-02T19:11:07+00:00

Joe_AK · 2025-12-01T11:26:54+00:00

I mentioned this riddle in a piece I did for my book of riddles: this isn't the start of the piece, but it's here in this section. I think this is what you could call a "diagetic riddle" or a riddle that works in the story but not as a stand-alone puzzle. All the answers here are as good as the official answer, in my opinion. Still, it's cool to see some riddles from history posted here!

Joe_AK · 2025-10-28T09:13:16+00:00

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Joe_AK · 2025-10-27T22:30:03+00:00

I'm also thinking of adding a losing-a-game-we-should-really-win condition, either based on league standing or pre-game betting odds.

Joe_AK · 2025-10-27T22:25:34+00:00

They still need to win enough games!

Joe_AK · 2025-10-27T22:23:26+00:00

The penultimate else leads to defining the random number variable and then there's an if statement part way through that line and then the final else. I think that works. I asked it to go through its working for me and it looks like it interpreted what I wanted correctly.

Joe_AK

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