The idea is that you can solve 3SUM by solving an instance of Triangles in Sparse Graphs, but 3SUM produces instances where those graphs are lopsided (i.e., tripartite graphs where one of the parts is much smaller than the other two). They found an efficient algorithm for those kinds of instances, and therefore an efficient algorithm for 3SUM.
Huh, good point. I wonder if this is the beginning of the end of constant phone upgrades. It used to be that new phones had much better hardware, so software that was only tested on new phones would make an older phone grind to a halt. But if the upgrades are much more incremental, perhaps a phone will last a lot longer?
Bonus: if you write all your tricks in a document, people will love your document. Whenever I offer a new student my CHEATSHEET.md file, their eyes absolutely light up.
Interesting! Hoka is extremely popular in my circles. They make excellent running shoes for beginners and decent running shoes for more serious athletes. They're also very popular among folks like service workers and nurses who are on their feet all day. I was very sad to find that they don't fit my feet well.
This is exactly how I feel about the recent ChatGPT models. It feels like I'm working with an incredibly enthusiastic junior student who listens to everything I say, checks it against my entire codebase, and thinks through all of the possible connections 1000x faster than I can. But it doesn't spot the ideas first. It actually makes work quite fun, since I can spend so much more time in "idea space" instead of "implementation space".
Yep. In accessibility research, they call these "situational disabilities". When you need to open a door with your arms full of groceries, you aren't so different from someone who is never able to open a door. Accommodations that help people with permanent disabilities also help other people in the right situations, too.
Same here in Canada. The solution is that the machines accept a Canadian quarter to run the press, but an American penny to be pressed. No Canadian currency is harmed!
I suspect that they might have switched away from the booster separation on purpose. That's probably a risky moment of the launch, and they may have wanted to avoid televising a disaster like in the Challenger launch.
Aside from that, agreed that the camera work was awful.
Oof. I had a great time cracking the top 100 of Advent of Code back in 2020. Bittersweet to know that I got in while it was still a fun challenge for humans.
This is all right, but it just kicks the intuition into the assumption that the function is convex. As far as I can tell from the paper, this turns out to be exactly the argument they use to prove that (1/2, 1/2) is the optimal guess. But the majority of that proof is dedicated to showing that the function is indeed convex.
Sure, I think it makes intuitive sense to me that you should play riskier when you're behind. The surprising part to me is that when you're ahead, even if you know that your opponent will play "sub-optimally", that doesn't change your own optimal move.
I know that it minimizes the expected number of moves. But, the goal is to maximize the probability that you win in fewer moves than your opponent, not minimize the expected number of moves. Given that your opponent is playing some riskier strategy, it's not intuitively obvious to me that your optimal moves for those two objectives are the same.
I find it somewhat surprising that the optimal play when you're ahead is still just binary search. Is there an intuitive reason why it's not productive to make riskier guesses? Why not use my lead to have some chance of sealing my victory immediately, while still maintaining my lead if I'm wrong?