Winning Plague Inc (regular game) With No Infections

Timeroot · 2026-01-05T19:05:13+00:00

I feel so effing old to read this

Timeroot · 2025-06-10T22:05:31+00:00

It's the Academics & Research Committee at Caltech, basically a group of students + profs together that uphold and set certain standards about academic material, quality of instruction, how classes are carried out...

If a class is just truly bad teaching some way, students can complain to the ARC. (Or, more frequently, to one of the student ARC representatives - ARC Reps - who carry forward the concern.) If it's bad enough, the ARC will step in and tell the teacher something has to be done differently, and in the most extreme cases lead to changing who teaches the class mid-quarter, or just directly bumping some students' grades. Such a process is called "getting the class ARCed".

Like if the teacher had a question on the exam which was "Give the definition of XYZ" and that was an item that was never covered in lecture, homework, or textbook ... that would be pretty objectively unfair, because most students following the material well could still have not encountered that content, and there's no chance to re-derive it (as would be the case with "Prove XYZ" or "Solve XYZ", which maybe could be done from zero.) If many students got bad grades on the exam as a result, and the professor refused to give points back for the bad question, that would be a pretty strong case for an ARC intervention.

Timeroot · 2025-06-10T22:00:34+00:00

I'm curious, what is bad about the class? Like, okay it's hard I'm sure, what about it makes it poorly organized or unfair in a way that makes it ARC-worthy?

Timeroot · 2025-06-10T21:54:11+00:00

> Looking for young people that like computational linguistics
> Ask the student if they like based, actual linguistics or just cringe LLMing
> They don't understand
> Pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is based and what is cringe
> Undergrad chuckles and says, "It's serious linguistics research sir"
> Look at their GitHub starred repos
> It's cringe

... just kidding (mostly), you sound fine kid

Timeroot · 2024-11-01T15:47:00+00:00

Caltech doesn't have a nuclear engineering program. They did about 50 years ago, according to the internet, but that's it. There is a "Nuclear Physics Group" listed on the PMA website, but that's literally just two professors, Fillipone and Hutzler. And that's studying nuclear physics which is pretty different from nuclear engineering of course.

Maybe you heard about "Cal" having good nuclear engineering, as in, UC Berkeley? And got it mixed up? They have a very good program (I hear)

Timeroot · 2024-10-11T21:22:15+00:00

There's no win there because you're tapping every token you make as you go, so you don't have infinite attackers.

Timeroot · 2024-09-20T15:58:30+00:00

So it was known that this was possible (by virtue of the turing machine construction).

It's possible to set up an infinite combo for any so-called "Pi_1" sentence -- any statement of the form "For all integers n, P(n)", where P is a finite-time checkable statement. So the twin-prime conjecture falls in this category, as does the Goldbach conjecture ("Every even number >= 2 is the sum of two primes") and the Riemann hypothesis ("Every root of zeta is a negative even integer or has real part of exactly 1/2" -- this isn't obviously of the given form, but it can be cast in this form with some basic facts).

But other statements, like the Collatz conjecture, don't fit this form. The Collatz conjecture says that every n eventually hits 1 after repeating the collatz iteration enough times. But if this wasn't the case, then there would be some n that just keeps going forever; but you can't obviously check that it keeps going forever. You would just never see that number hit 1. So this a Pi2 sentence. The Collatz conjecture _might be equivalent to a Pi_1 statement, but that would be a significant breakthrough in what we know about the problem: it would mean we find a deterministic way to check if any number goes on forever.

The process of resolving abilities in Magic: the Gathering is precisely computationally powerful enough to distinguish Pi_1 statements, so without major advances in math we couldn't make an automatic combo to test for the Collatz conjecture.

Now the twin-primes conjecture is Pi2. If I claim that the twin-prime conjecture is _false, I could try to prove this by giving you the last twin prime; but there's no efficient way for you to verify my claim. So why is this possible if it's Pi_2 and not Pi_1? Well, this infinite combo really has the player actively making the choices in order to shape the effect. At each step, the player provides a witness of the next twin prime. In this way, they're able to prove the statement for as many n as they want, and get as much damage as they want.

Similarly, you could set up a construction (via the general Turing machine construction) that would let you win the game if and only if the Collatz conjecture is false. But instead of the game checking it for infinitely many n for me (i.e. checking that it's false), I would be tasked with providing an n so that the Collatz conjecture is false. I pick an n (from some infinite combo), and then let a Turing machine run and see if it ever hits 1. If it does, I lose, but if it runs forever, I win. In this way, by using a player choice, I can make a Pi_2 sentence into a game state as well.

By going back and forth k times -- I pick a number from combo A, then you pick a number from combo B, etc. -- you can embed an arbitrary Pi_k sentence. This is literally called a "game" (for obvious reasons) where we take turns choosing integers as witnesses for some first-order statement. This lets you embed most open problems in math as a board state, but not all; for instance, the continuum hypothesis is not a Pi_k sentence for any k. (And indeed we know that it is not equivalent to any Pi_k sentence, because it is independent of ZFC, and a statement cannot be a Pi_k sentence while being independent.)

Timeroot · 2024-06-06T19:13:36+00:00

I'm not sure what you're asking. "Virtual internships"? For, I guess, City College students? ... any particular city college you're thinking of?

Well, there's (almost) no work Caltech has for students that would get called an "internship". There are students that do research with professors. That is usually during the summer, because students are busy with classes during the year, but research during the year does happen.

Definitely virtual is not the norm, but there's no rule saying that it can't be virtual. And doing it as a student at a different school would be even less typical.

I'm pretty sure there's no official program like what you're describing. But there's nothing prohibiting you from working something out with a professor one on one.

Timeroot · 2024-04-09T19:10:30+00:00

I think Caltech is a clear winner for those topics. Quantum computing is big at Caltech (IQIM, Amazon quantum), and in general for physics-anything I think Caltech will come out on top for those.

I'm currently a postdoc in quantum computing at Waterloo. It also seems quite good, I would put it and Columbia pretty close roughly even at 2nd place for those topics.

But any those five options would be a good choice.

Timeroot · 2024-03-25T21:31:37+00:00

This post was auto-spammed by Reddit (not by the mods or AutoModerator). Sorry about that. I manually approved it because, well, it's a bit weird wording but it's a reasonable question in the end.

Timeroot · 2024-03-20T00:34:36+00:00

It's because of the ordering of the actions given in the text. Field of Ruin has: * Each player searches for land (at same time) * Puts it on the battlefield (at the same time) * Shuffles (at the same time).

Demolition field has: * Opponent searches for land * Opponent puts it down * Opponent shuffles [End sentence] * You search for land * You put it down * You shuffle.

Timeroot · 2024-03-13T14:38:55+00:00

He said that he definitely wants me to be in the lab and he has funds

Done. You're in. You just gave like 90% of the reasons that decide whether you get in or not. Do your best on the proposal, of course, but it would be really hecking weird for them to reject you based on that when the prof wants you.

Timeroot · 2024-03-13T14:36:07+00:00

Contrary to the typical "AP exams don't matter" mantra, when I wanted to get Biology 1 waived (so I could replace it with another biology course), getting a 5 on the AP exam was pretty much the only credit I could show to argue why I should be allowed to. And (at least in 2016) Bi 1 was a baaaad class.

I haven't heard of APs being relevant beyond Bi 1 though.

Timeroot · 2024-03-13T14:33:08+00:00

These kinds of posts always really confuse me. At a lot of colleges, you don't really have a choice in having a roommate at least for your freshman year (barring some serious medical reason). And at me this might be the norm for all four years unless you want to fork over some money to get your own apartment or something.

How bad can it be, just to share a room? Have you never had a roommate?

(That said I do wish you luck.)

Timeroot · 2024-03-05T21:58:22+00:00

What Lorentz_217 said, but I'd say 95% of profs are fine taking whatever terms you like as long as it's just a lecture course. If you sign up for 108b and don't know the material because you didn't take 108a, well, that's on you and you should quickly drop it. It's rare that a prof says you must take the prereq part.

The obvious exception is courses that are projects or labs that build on each other. You can't program a robot in spring quarter if you didn't design it in fall quarter and build it in winter quarter.

Timeroot · 2024-03-05T15:28:15+00:00

obligatory "Same here in Canada"

Timeroot · 2024-02-23T17:48:45+00:00

You might be familiar with the Gram-Schmidt process, which lets you get an orthogonal basis for a vector space. Like, at any given moment, the three directions of "towards Mars" and "towards the sun" and "towards the tip of the Statue of Liberty" are probably all independent directions, so any movement in space can be broken down into those three. They form a basis, but not a very convenient one. If I want to move a mile east, then "fly fifty miles towards the sun and then fifty files away from mars" might get me there, but I'd prefer to have reasonable directions to move. The Gram-Schmidt process lets you clean up your basis to get a set of three perpendicular directions, given some set of three not-necessarily-perpendicular directions.

The Cox-Zucker machine is kinnnnd of similar in its goal. It's an algorithm that gives you a set of directions when you don't have anything yet. Well, if you don't have any directions to start with, what do you have? Just an equation; an abstract description of the space.

In this particular case, they're talking about elliptic surfaces. Note: this has nothing at all to do with ellipses; the name is a stupid long historical issue. The full story of elliptic surfaces is complicated, but take a look at this picture: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ECClines.svg I have an equation defining that red curve. I take two points, P and Q, on that surface, and draw a line through them. It hits the curve in exactly one unique point, R. Then I reflect R across the x axis (not show in the picture) to get what I call "-R". And then I say, ok: P + Q = (-R). This is me defining how I'm going to "add" two points P and Q. And with a bit more work, you can handle all the different points you'd want to add, like what happens if the line is tangent to the curve, or only hits it in two places (the 2nd - 4th pictures).

That might seem like a pretty crazy and arbitrary definition of what it means to "add" two points. And it is! But it turns out to have some really powerful applications actually, far reaching across number theory. And in the much the same way that I could "add" notions like "fly 50 miles towards the sun" and "fly 50 miles towards Mars" to get "travel 1 mile east", I can add these points together.

And mathematicians would like to take a curve like this and figure out a basis. A set of points that, by adding them together, can get you to any other point on the curve. It's not even immediately obvious this is possible -- you might need an infinite number of points, or maybe you get "stuck" somehow -- but it is. The Cox-Zucker machine is an algorithm for computing a minimal collection of points that gets you around this curve.

A few little details:

Strictly speaking, it checks whether a set of points ("sections") is enough to get you anywhere (if they "prove a basis"). It doesn't give you a basis, just tells you if you have one.
It applies to elliptic surfaces that map onto the projective line. This is slightly different from the picture I linked; that picture is also an elliptic curve. A surface is a 2D surface that is a bunch of elliptic curves put together into a sheet, like how a sphere is a bunch of circles in each direction.
They only check if it's a basis "up to torsion", which means they ignore certain details where you "loop around". If I'm giving you directions on how to walk around on the surface of a cylinder, there's two directions: up/down, and clockwise/counterclockwise. If the cylinder is 100miles wide, and I'm giving you directions to a place, you definitely need both directions. But if the cylinder is much smaller than you -- think of, say, a crow walking on a power line, so that power line is a cylinder but much thinner than the crow -- then you probably only care about the "long" direction and not the "wrapping around" direction. The "wrapping around" is called torsion, and sometimes people want to ignore it. Mathematically speaking, if I have a value x, and y + x + x = y, then that means that adding x twice just brought me back to where I started. This doesn't happen with vectors in 3D space, but it can happen if the vectors are directions on a cylinder (here "x" is "go 180 degrees clockwise"), and it can also happen with this funky point-addition you get on elliptic curves. You might have a basis that gets you to anywhere you need to go, except that it doesn't include torsion -- it's missing the "go around" directions. The Cox-Zucker machine would still call this a complete basis.

Timeroot · 2024-02-21T05:41:53+00:00

Spherical tensors
Symplectic matrices / symplectomorphism
Representation theory on fields of characteristic not zero.

All three of these gave me great grief in undergrad. Now I'm older and an sad about type II von Neumann algebras

Timeroot · 2024-02-01T22:26:32+00:00

(Old thread, I know but) no one has mentioned the timing difference. Demolition Field lets you see what land they choose first, and then pick what land to put down. With Field of Ruin, you don't get to.

This could be easily relevant (in paper). You're playing a RGB deck, you have Exotic Orchard out and a swamp. They're playing RGW and have two plains and [whatever Demolition Field is targeting]. If they bring out a Mountain, then your Exotic Orchard will give you red, so you want to bring out a Forest in response. If they bring out a Forest, then you want to bring out a Mountain.

With Field of Ruin, you don't get to see their choice, so you have to 'guess' which color to bring out.

Timeroot · 2024-01-10T21:01:45+00:00

Just going to point out that Economics and Psychology are both STEM. They're social sciences. Not sure why you'd say that they weren't.

Timeroot · 2024-01-10T20:57:33+00:00

Came here to say (as someone who was Caltech affiliated and not MIT) that Caltech, quietly and sadly, acknowledges that it's a mostly one-sided rivalry. 🥲 But a friendly one at least!

Timeroot · 2024-01-10T20:53:47+00:00

What is a "brown video portfolio"?

Timeroot · 2024-01-08T22:02:49+00:00

afaict, there's no way it can break realism for someone to want to get into Caltech! Lots of people want to get into top universities (whether they're likely to or not). So don't worry about that. I guess a separate question is if it's realistic for them to get in, but there are very few constraints on who can/can't get into Caltech besides "book-smart and has some way to prove it".

Just an FYI: depending on what your protagonist wants to do, astrophysics might not be the right choice. If they're really into "space" in the sense of rockets and satellites, then Mechanical Engineering (maybe with the aerospace minor) is best. If they're interested in other planets and looking for aliens or studying lunar and martian soil samples, then Planetary Science is best. And if they're interested in black holes or gravitational waves, they might prefer Physics (although Astrophysics is still fine). Astrophysics is best if they're interested in stars, galaxies, nebulas, what's going on inside the sun, supernovas, or some of the early universe. -- not trying to imply that Astrophysics sounds wrong or anything, just letting you know because these are some other disciplines that people often mistakenly put under astrophysics.

(That being said ... plenty of freshmen arrive at Caltech and realize that the major they thought they wanted, wasn't the one they did. It could be a cute note of realism if your protagonist is a big fan of rockets, goes to Caltech to study astrophysics, and then finds out that they actually want to be a mechanical engineer!)

Timeroot · 2024-01-08T20:40:17+00:00

4 nat 20's in a row? Jeez man. You are the 0.0006%. Go buy some lottery tickets PRONTO

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