# Tag Info

29

Tic-Tac-Toe, or any other solved game that lets either player force a tie. Solved games, especially easy ones to remember like tic-tac-toe, can be pretty boring because both players can play their optimal winning strategy regardless of what the opponent does. This means if both players of a game of tic-tac-toe are playing optimally, then it will only ever ...

28

Volume is the cube of length. Therefore, if the length of a human drops by a factor of x; the volume drops by a factor of x$^3$. Therefore, a 3" person is $$\frac{3}{72} = 0.042$$ the length of a regular person, then he would be $0.042^3 = 0.000072$ times the volume (and mass) of that person. Multiply that factor by 200 lbs to get 0.014 lbs; or 0.2 ...

20

The question itself is not really answerable. Since Death gets to choose which games he is willing to play, we can't achieve a 35% win rate unless Death wants to give us a 35% win rate. Thus we need to work to the motivation of Death. What does death want? I can't speak for Death here, because Death's motivation isn't in the question's text. However, I ...

14

You can't win. Not even once, not ever. By definition, at most one player in a game can have a winning strategy A winning strategy is a plan for playing a game that means you win no matter what the other person does. This means that any game that is solved or potentially solvable (such as Chess), Death will always take the role of the side that has the ...

12

I believe that I once read in a book about about mathematics that Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) popularized the square cube ratio in relation to biology. As the dimensions of a shape change, the shape's area changes with the square of the dimensions while the shape's volume changes with the cube of the dimensions. So a man 10 times as tall as your 6 ...

12

Weight varies as the cube of height, not linearly. 190 pounds/373,248 cubic inches means 0.014 pounds/27 cubic inches. Your 3” man weighs a fifth of an ounce.

11

I think that without frame matching there will be severe limitations. While I am sitting at my desk to write this answer, I feel I am standing still. However: planet Earth is rotating around its axis, and this gives me a certain velocity vector $v_E$. This is 1668 km/h at the Equator, 0 km/h at the poles. the Earth is orbiting the Sun, this gives me ...

10

Yes - you use a Base 6 system which has been done before Quite a few cultures used Base 6 counting systems in the past, and it is actually quite logical because it is the natural outcome of counting on one hand. As well as being popular a long time ago, it is even in use today with some native cultures, such as in Papua New Guinea, Congo and Ural Mountains....

9

Just Make It Up. Most of our mathematical symbols like Summation, Integration (another type of summation), epsilon, derive from the Greek alphabet, which had nothing to do with Europeans. And if you read translations of Plato or Archimedes, you may find diagrams (which would be common and similar amongst all languages) and words, in many cases they didn't ...

8

Your logic is incorrect, because our universe is not a formal system of logic, and so the Incompleteness Theorem does not apply to it. Furthermore, the Incompleteness Theorem requires an infinite domain, but the observable universe is finite, so there are only a finite number of statements you can make about it. A system which admits only a finite number of ...

8

Predicting the actions of someone you know If there is no new information from the world of the living in Death's domain, then the personality of someone who is still alive is unknown to Death. Therefore, you must make a wager with Death that if Death offers someone, still alive, a deal, you will predict whether that person will take the offer or not. For ...

7

From a somehow formal point of view, math is totally abstract from reality. This is why once a mathematical theorem is demonstrated, nobody bothers invalidating it. When math starts to mess with reality becomes physics, and there the problems start. Think of Pythagoras theorem in Euclidean geometry and General Relativity: nobody is trying to find ...

6

The brain of these individuals is able to carry out some sort of quantum annealing Quantum annealing (QA) is a metaheuristic for finding the global minimum of a given objective function over a given set of candidate solutions (candidate states), by a process using quantum fluctuations. Quantum annealing is used mainly for problems where the search space ...

6

They don't calculate, they perceive Rather than calculating all possible outcomes, which can be problematic*, consider this instead: Your gifted individuals can somehow see/sense into the future - but not just "our real future", but many possible ones (maybe even every possible one). You can use the "Many worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics to ...

5

under 1.1 ounces. The smallest primate in the world is Madame Berthe's mouse lemur which is just over the size of your 3" human the average body length is 9.2 cm (3.6 in) and seasonal weight is around 30 g (1.1 oz).

5

Nothing happens, because most folks are smarter than that. What happens is that everybody at the court simply lies to the Mad Emperor about how great the new law is going over. They probably have long experience spinning such fantasies already, and lots of previous mad edicts probably never made it out the gate either. Either the Emperor is sane enough to ...

5

Mathematically you are indeed solid, take an infinite set from an infinite set and it remains infinite, counterintuitive but that's because we deal with concrete numbers of stuff in our everyday physical existence, infinity is hard to grasp from that perspective. In terms of three dimensional spaces your initial infinite space (the Mundane world) must be a ...

4

Calculating a future population based on a given population growth rate is quite easy: $populationFuture = populationCurrent \cdot e^{r \cdot t}$ where r is your annual population growth rate and t is the number of years in the future. But while your colony may be self-sufficient, if it's a closed system it too will have to grow so the question becomes ...

4

I'm thinking of a number from 1 to 100. Is it even or odd? This gives you a 50% chance of winning, regardless of whether you are the thinker of the guesser, assuming death can not read your mind. To be safe though, use a coin if guessing or a d100 if thinking. He can't influence the outcome as this is not a game of chance.

4

I'm going to attempt an answer to my own question. Ban all odd numbers Thus you are allowed to have: 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, etc. sheep. Similarly count your fingers in pairs - then everything will add up correctly. This will always work for addition, subtraction and multiplication. Unfortunately there is a problem with division. Let us just hope that the ...

4

It doesn't really impact the story that much, at least what's written so far, but depending on the answer it could guide future developments in the story (such is the point of world-building after all). The closest thing that's happened so far is that the god explains to her divine human counterpart that the Divine and Mundane realms can't interact directly, ...

3

I'll assume that your world is spherical and not rotating fast enough for centrifugal force to make a difference. The surface gravity then depends on two things: The planet's mass and its radius. Let M be the planet's mass in units of the Earth's mass (i.e., Earth has mass 1.0.) Let R be the planet's radius in terms of the Earth's radius (i.e., we're ...

3

Ok, lets start with a population of 10,000 colonists. I will assume that the population consists entirely of adults that have been selected to be of reproductive age, and that half the population is female. Each woman will produce between 0 and 5 offspring. Assuming that they're voluntary colonists, it is likely that all available females are willing to ...

3

The key point here is that "Death is too competitive to let anyone win". You're playing for your life, but he apparently doesn't really care about that. He wants the win. It's just a game to him, and given that he has you outmatched in every department he expects to get you beat. So, let's take a look at the game of Mornington Crescent, made popular on ...

3

In which country? There are numerous reported cases of children entering university young. They just need to prove to the university that they are a suitable candidate. The usual way to do that is formal education and grades in prior subjects but that is far from the only way. For example: Maths whizz, 10, becomes one of UK's youngest university students ...

3

Lots of people go to college after being homeschooled (with no brick and mortar schooling at all). Even unschooling (where the parent doesn't do anything formal, just gives the child opportunities and allows them to choose what to learn) is enough to prepare a child for college. After all, many of the top colleges were founded back when only the wealthy ...

3

In math one infinite set of numbers is larger than another infinite set of numbers, when you can propose a way to count every number of the second set, without using all numbers of the first. Or proving that even when every number of the second set is used, some numbers of the first set are still unaccounted for. For example say you would like to show that ...

2

Cards Against Humanity - with a twist I used to play CAH with my friends. To make it more challenging, we created a new rule, called the Invisible [I can't say it in this family-friendly site]. During the czar's turn, they don't receive the white cards from the other players directly. Instead, the players all get their own white cards in a pile and add as ...

2

Winning a game is "easy", the real problem is tricking Death into accepting a game you can win, when Death can reject any game he doesn't like, he must understand the game before making a decision, and he's smarter than you. Perfect information games won't work: either both can solve it/know the solution and he knows you have a fair chance (so he rejects it)...

2

Strictly speaking, no. There is no possible way of doing this the way you've specified without chaos. Imagine you have fourteen sheep — officious local lord looks at them, counts them, and once they reach seven, declare one of that set has to die. They start again, get to seven again, and by the end of the process you've lost 8 sheep... except the slaughter ...

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