Divide a region into N equal area pieces, minimizing the length of cuts. Do the cuts always end up being line segments, or can there be minimal curved cuts?
Divide the contiguous U.S. into 48 new states along new borders that are "simple" for a surveyor. Although a bunch of long thin strips (perhaps longitude cuts) are simple, we probably don't want that. Maybe preserve major rivers being boundaries. Probably want equal population instead of equal area.
Attempt to debate a topic: everyone speaks at once in chaos. (Or maybe not.)
Assume a polar topic, only two sides. Instead, each side is directed to choose a representative to argue their point, the most capable, the most intelligent. While left unstated how to choose, everyone on the side is has a common interest of choosing a good representative.
Dump a program's state. Upgrade the program. Reload state.
Formally prove that nothing goes wrong.
This would be helpful for seamless, automatic, unattended upgrades.
Easily browse Lisp-like code on a printed page.
Every parenthesis is annotated with three numbers: its identifier, its match, and its up-list number. The identifier number enumerates parentheses in ascending order of appearance: (1 (2 )3 )4. The match number gives the matching parenthesis. The up-list number gives the enclosing corresponding parenthesis, Emacs functions backward-up-list and up-list for open and close respectively.
Full example: (1m4u- (2m3u1 )3m2u4 )4m1u-. Perhaps more compactly: (1,4 1(2,3 2,3)4 1,4) with the type encoded by position, mirror symmetry between open and close: u(i,m m,i)u. Bigger example: (1,10 1(2,7 2(3,4 3,4)7 2(5,6 5,6)7 2,7)10 1(8,9 8,9)10 1,10).
A number may be truncated to a suffix if the prefix is noted at the beginning of the line. This could become a typesetting challenge.
Maybe typeset numbers at different levels to help distinguish the different types: above, below, superscript, subscript. Omit obvious numbers, like the backward-up-list for the second parenthesis of two open parentheses in a row. Bigger example becomes: (1,10 (2,7 (3 4)7 2(5 6) 2,7)10 1(8 9) 1,10). Could omit numbers that are not referenced: (1,10 (2,7 ( )7 2( ) 2,7)10 1( ) 1,10). They remain invisibly numbered for ease of external references.
Other than the trivial 1 in all bases, 102 (2 in binary) is the only number whose value describes the number of digits it has.
A demonstration of somewhat random chess endgame technique. The winning side makes random moves which preserve the win but not necessarily make progress. The losing side plays the most stubborn defense. The winning side tries somewhat to avoid recently seen positions.
Next, try to do this formally perfectly. The winning side, armed only with a bitbase that does not give distance, must avoid cul-de-sacs in the graph that to make progress require exiting through the same entrance, repeating a position. The losing side tries to force the other into cul-de-sacs, which might be different from the most stubborn defense.
Sedna has a 11,400 year orbital period which reaches perihelion in 2076. Consider constructing a space probe to land on it or (very stably) orbit it for a full solar orbit, ostensibly to study then report back on conditions in the outer solar system.
Can we construct a machine that will remain functional for 11,000 years? It's kind of like a time capsule. Unlike the clock of the Long Now, Sedna will probably see very little disturbances like weather.
Is landing on a large solid body easier or better than simply putting a probe onto a solitary 11,000 year orbit? Perhaps less likely to be gravitationally perturbed and lost.
Some notes on installing Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin onto a USB thumb drive: Sandisk Cruzer Fit 4 GB.
Slightly surprising that the size of the disk is actually about 4*10^9, not 4*1024^3; I had previously assumed Flash ROMs are built in powers of 2 like RAM.
Write bandwidth 30 Mb/s, read bandwidth 130 Mb/s ; faster than USB 1.1 (12 Mb/s) but considerably slower than USB 2.0 theoretical maximum of 480 Mb/s.
Tried both, but eventually chose Xubuntu over Ubuntu. Hope is that fewer packages mean fewer updates, conserving persistent space. Also Xmonad is easier to get working with Xubuntu.
Created usb stick with usb-creator-gtk version 0.2.34 on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneirec. Had major problems when creating large persistent files; the program would suddenly quit with no apparent reason, leaving the ISO image mounted in a tmp directory. Eventually, the right thing is to only create a small one, then delete it and create a larger one with the same name (casper-rw) dd if=/dev/zero, then losetup, then mkfs.ext2. (Avoid journal to avoid many writes to disk?)
Workaround for apt failure
48xubuntu_maybe_ubiquity: 6: .: Can't open /scripts/casper-functions
cd / ; sudo ln -s /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts
Workaround for
run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-update-grub 3.2.0-29-generic /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-29-generic
/usr/sbin/grub-probe: error: cannot find a device for / (is /dev mounted?).
apt-get purge grub2-common
It boots fine without grub.
Install aptitude because I prefer it. When did apt start installing recommended packages by default? Use -R
sudo apt-get purge smbclient thunderbird language-pack-gnome-fr-base language-pack-gnome-es-base language-pack-gnome-pt-base language-pack-es-base language-pack-pt-base gnumeric-common language-pack-fr-base language-pack-gnome-zh-hans-base language-pack-zh-hans-base libsmbclient samba-common-bin
Use deborphan -n -a to purge unneeded packages. I'm unsure about how recommended (-n) some packages are.
Aptitude full-upgrade. Took an hour because of slow disk IO speed. Eats up a gigabyte of persistent space.
Consider Congressional apportionment based not on census population but on voter turnout, actual counts of voter participation. This might serve to counter attempts at voter suppression (e.g., voter ID laws promoted by Republicans) and encourage broad availability of voting methods, e.g., multi-day voting, weekend voting, vote-by-mail.
Other things will probably go wrong.
What is the volume and surface area of the Earth (perhaps idealized), taking into account the general relativistic curvature of spacetime caused by the Earth's gravity? What is the difference (defect) from the Euclidean volume and surface area?
What happens at even more extreme curvature, like the volume and surface area of the escape horizon of a black hole?
Create a tic-tac-toe game in which moves are echoed with telephone touch tones, not depicted on a screen.
What other games can be played with sound instead of sight?
A concrete question equivalent to philosophical musing of why the value of the fine-structure constant alpha is what it is is why the fundamental charge e (charge of an electron or proton) is sqrt(alpha) ≈ 0.08542 ≈ (1/11.706) Planck charge units. Wouldn't it be nice if it were a rational or other "nice" number?
The smallest discrete charges currently known are multiples of e/3 observed in quarks. Will we someday discover fundamental particles with even smaller discrete charges?
For which of the objects in the night sky, if we emitted an electromagnetic signal now, would the signal eventually reach it or its remnants, taking into account the expansion of the universe? This distance represents the threshold for interstellar colonization, the colonizable universe, the farthest we could travel even if we had nearly lightspeed ships launched today. (No wormholes or warp drives.)
There exist objects in the night sky that we can see, but never reach, which we can see (its past) but not (our present) be seen from. We might observe a signal from an alien civilization from one of those distant worlds, but never be able to respond.
Let the matrix A=
2 -1 -3 4 0 -1 3 -2 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 -1
The columns correspond to ampere, kilogram, meter, and second respectively. The rows correspond to the exponents of the units of the Coulomb constant 1/(4πε0), gravitational constant G, fundamental charge e, and speed of light c. Then 2*inv(A)=
-1 -1 0 6 1 -1 2 0 1 1 2 -4 1 1 2 -6
from which can read off Stoney units expressed in SI units:
You have: sqrt(coulombconst^-1 G^-1 e^0 c^6) You want: Definition: 3.4788728e+25 A You have: sqrt(coulombconst^1 G^-1 e^2 c^0) You want: Definition: 1.8592089e-09 kg You have: sqrt(coulombconst^1 G^1 e^2 c^-4) You want: Definition: 1.3806783e-36 m You have: sqrt(coulombconst^1 G^1 e^2 c^-6) You want: Definition: 4.6054472e-45 s
We can also get conversion to planck units. e/sqrt(alpha)/plancktime is planck current, not built into the "units" program
You have: sqrt(coulombconst^-1 G^-1 e^0 c^6) You want: e/sqrt(alpha)/plancktime * 1 / 1 You have: sqrt(coulombconst^1 G^-1 e^2 c^0) You want: planckmass * 0.085424543 / 11.706238 You have: sqrt(coulombconst^1 G^1 e^2 c^-4) You want: plancklength * 0.085424543 / 11.706238 You have: sqrt(coulombconst^1 G^1 e^2 c^-6) You want: plancktime * 0.085424543 / 11.706238
The recurring constant 0.0854 is sqrt(alpha), where alpha is the fine structure constant.
I've patched my units.dat to get planckmass more correct:
--- /usr/share/misc/units.dat 2009-12-12 19:38:32.000000000 -0500
+++ units.dat 2012-08-27 03:25:37.458785728 -0400
@@ -902,7 +902,7 @@
# binding energy of the deuteron
# Planck constants
-planckmass 2.1767e-8 kg # sqrt(hbar c / G)
+planckmass sqrt(hbar c / G)
m_P planckmass
plancktime hbar / planckmass c^2
t_P plancktime
because otherwise you get this:
You have: sqrt(hbar c G^-1) You want: planckmass * 0.99987785 / 1.0001222
It is easy to travel faster than the speed of light. Speed is always measured relative to a reference frame, and here we cheat by choosing as a reference a distant star or quasar, so distant that, because of the expansion of the universe, it is receding faster than the speed of light. It is beyond the edge of the observable universe, as light from it would never reach us.
Then, superluminal travel is accomplished simply by doing nothing. Let the expansion of the universe do all the work. The maximum speed limit of c based on Einstein's theory of special relativity only applies to static, flat spacetime.
Take a physical object that isn't quite what you want and modify it so it is, perhaps in a machine shop. Not many people do this. I think more should.
Repeat for a piece of software that doesn't quite do what you want it to. In this realm, we are stymied by closed source and DRM, but not many people are bothered by this because of the same lack of culture of modifying physical objects. More people should.
Is the human tendency to learn then follow any given rules of society, often without question, an evolutionary trait, not wholly learned? Some children seem easier to "make behave" than others.
If so, what genes control it? (We would not expect to see those genes in yeast or mice.) What alleles are there, and what behavior do different alleles induce?
Are social forces breeding more or less docile individuals? The irony, or tremendous complication to analysis, is that a great many social rules exist ultimately to control who may have sex with whom.
A uniformly randomly selected person can very likely be trusted, for certain things. The failure happens when non-trustable adversaries attempt to game the system, to be selected more often than uniformly randomly.
There is value in being able to select a person uniformly randomly. Perhaps a government resource or a private enterprise.
Privacy is a concern. Usually, you only want selection from a subset of the population, so privacy of who is a member of the subset.
Is governance more like climbing on top a mound of powder kegs, people wanting change, so needing to control them, to suppress them, or like herding a flock of slackers, all selfish and lazy?
Can this be measured?
The set intersection of three cylinders at right angles is a bulbous rhombic dodecahedron. The axes of the cylinders coincide with lines joining the vertices of an octahedron to the center.
Investigate cylinders intersecting along axes of other polyhedra.
How does it roll? Joins the sphericon, two cones joined twisted, gomboc, and Kelvin cell (with curved faces) of things I want to 3D print.
If many votes in a legislature are going straight down party lines, consider it a symptom that something is wrong: let all of them become ineligible for reelection.
Party line votes suggest political parties more intent on gaining power than legislators interested in doing what is best for their country, state, etc. What is best should be nearly unanimous.
However, such a trigger will probably induce perverse behavior. What will go wrong?
A lot of politics is simply about defining or moving a property line for which no line is necessarily better than another; it just decides who compensates whom. Bargaining power for such issues naturally leads to factions.
Computational problem: discover political parties even if they are kept secret. Clustering and Expectation-Maximization.
The inspiration was the story behind indirect election of senators, which was repealed because political infighting within state legislatures kept seats vacant. If that happens, replace the entire state legislature.
Correlate major drug busts with regional macroeconomic activity.
The inspiration was the Guzman Boston cocaine arrests and seizures of July 2012. Cocaine being stereotypically the drug of choice of the rich and powerful, what happens when the rich and powerful are deprived, or face significantly higher prices, for their favorite entertainment? Can the effect be seen in productivity, decisions, or other actions and effects of the rich and powerful?
Text can be considered a one dimensional UI. Graphics add a second dimension. Animation adds a dimension in time. Interactivity adds another "dimension".
Consider a 3D object on a 2D screen: it's 3D-ness can only be comprehended by rotating it on screen, either interactively or with animation.
The incompetent are the least likely to realize their incompetence. Therefore, never trust your supposed knowledge of your competence unless it can be objectively measured.
(But measurements may exhibit error.)
Are the incompetent the most likely to reject evidence and measurements of their incompetence?
The computer measures the rate and severity of mistakes (e.g., centipawns in chess) you make, then makes mistakes similarly, to provide an "equal" (not curb-stomping) level of play.
Also try to match the complexity of your mistakes: the lookahead depth at which the mistake becomes evident.
First possible implementation: Dodgem.
Take a unit square and cut out a sqrt(0.5) by sqrt(0.5) square out of one corner, exactly half the area. Cut up the L-shaped piece orthogonally and rearrange it symmetrically into another square. An infinite number of pieces is likely required.
Cut off the two arms from the L and arrange as bars, leaving a .121 by .707 gap to be filled by the material of a .293 by .293 square. Or scaled, a .414 by 2.414 gap by a unit square.
Slice two .121 by .293 bars and place them in the gap, leaving a .121 by .121 square to be filled by the remaining material of .0503 by .293. Again, scaled unit square filling .414 by 2.414.
Because of identical scaling, this can be repeated recursively forever.
Place corner reflectors, three mirrors meeting perpendicularly, in locations somewhat obscured and unexpected until someone shines a bright light on it, and it surprisingly reflects straight back.
Toggle buttons which add.
0..9 = +5 +2 +1 +1
For a digital clock:
0..5 = +3 +1 +1
0..2 = +1 +1
But these still possible to get nonsensical 29:00, so
0..23 = +12 +6 +3 +1 +1
For a touchscreen.
Alternatively, grids of 24 buttons for hour, 12 (multiples of 5) for minutes and +3 +1 +1.
Place your powered data reader next to the unpowered data object. The reader picks up the data.
Bar code readers (e.g., QR code) and unpowered RFID tags are two ways this is currently done, but the data transfered is at most thousands of bytes. Is there a way to get more, much more? Say megabytes in a second.
A straightforward but clumsy possible way is electrical contacts and a plug. The powered reader provides enough power directly for the transfer. But smartphones on USB are not expecting to be bus master.
The inspiration was a print ad on the subway: scan this QR code to get a website address for our brochure which you can access as soon as you get network access aboveground. Far simpler would be, scan this code which contains the entirety of our brochure; no network needed.
Embrace offensive speech: don't just merely tolerate it. The more offensive, the better.
Inane offensive speech being spoken signifies lack of mechanisms which could also be used to silence important speech. So long as inane offensive speech keeps being spoken, we know that important speech, perhaps also offensive to some, can get also through. Whenever inane offensive speech is blocked, who knows what important speech is also getting blocked?
While government can be a powerful actor in censorship, it can also be accomplished by extra-judicial means: social actions aimed at punishing the speaker of offensive speech, perhaps loss of income or unhappiness. All such actions, despite many being legally permitted, are antithetical to the principle of freedom of speech: the free expression of ideas, unfettered by governmental or nongovernmental restraints, is fundamental to a healthy democracy. Freedom of speech is hard.
Offensive speech means democracy is working...
Have you held your tongue for fear of the social repercussions of offending someone? Have you meted out social punishment, e.g., shunning, against someone for speech that offended you?
...maybe this is one of the reasons why democracy isn't working.
Provide a service to run arbitrary programs analyzing a large chess endgame tablebase, probably too large for a typical user to have locally. Probably MapReduce, so a loadable public database hosted in the cloud.
Inspiration is, you've written a compact endgame engine. Which positions does it get wrong?
MapReduce can also be used to generate the tablebase.
Create a full naming scheme to help avoid incest.
The American scheme, where the baby takes on the father's last name, does OK. It does better than Iceland, where the baby takes on the father's first name as a surname. Iceland has adopted a separate database to avoid incest.
Could a naming scheme be better? In the American system, it is still possible for 1st cousins to have different surnames. Another problem is surnames tend to disappear, resulting in the problem seen in Korea, where 3 surnames (Kim, Park, Cho) account for a huge percentage of the population, leading to false positives, or people disregarding surnames, defeating the purpose. A simple modification might be always to choose the less common of the parents' surnames.
Hyphenation helps, but define what to do with a hyphenated parent (or two).
Given sex-linked traits, is the American patrilineal system superior to a symmetric matrilineal system?
The patrilineal system is sometimes tricky because the father is not known.
Ideal might be some graphical representation, then two potential mates can compare pictures to seem how close they are. Coat of arms (heraldry) (though technically not graphical: it's words).
Program a realistic simulation and compare schemes over virtual generations.
To award 1st-3rd place, e.g., Olympic medals, consider a swiss tournament as an alternative to straight knockout or pool play then knockout.
To decrease the number of games, consider eliminating teams whenever they reach 3 losses. If all goes according to plan, 1st place will have 0 losses, 2nd place 1 loss, 3rd place 2 losses. However, I'm far from convinced things will go according to plan.
Accelerated swiss.
Inspired by badminton, and Spain throwing their pool play basketball game against Brazil to successfully reach the gold medal game. How much strategic losing, i.e., swiss gambit, occurs in swiss tournaments?
Newton's method and the arithmetic-geometric mean exhibit awesome quadratic numerical convergence with which we can quickly compute thousands of digits.
Repeatedly squaring a matrix yields its largest eigenvalue. With [ 1, 1 ; 1, 0 ], one can calculate the golden ratio.
Are there any others?
The arithmetic-geometric mean may be used to compute values the complete elliptic integral of the first kind with quadratic convergence (number of digits precision doubles each iteration). However, for determining ellipse perimeter, we need the second kind. Michael Press, in a post to sci.math on Sun, 08 Feb 2009 02:55:24 -0800, explains how the complete elliptic integral of the second kind can be computed with the AGM:
Arithmetic-Geometric mean:
a_{n+1} = (a_n + b_n)/2
b_{n+1} = sqrt{a_n * b_n}
c_{n+1} = (a_n - b_n)/2
M(a, b) = lim_{n -> oo} a_n = \lim_{n -> oo} b_n
K(k) and E(k) are the complete elliptic integrals of the
first and second kind. k' = sqrt{1 - kk}.
K(k) = int_0^{pi/2} du / sqrt{1-k^2.sin^2 u}
= pi / (2.M(1, k'))
E(k) = int_0^{pi/2} sqrt{1-k^2.sin^2 u} du
= (1 - S) K(k)
where S = sum_n 2^{n-1}.(c_n)^2.
The perimeter, A, of an ellipse with semiaxes a and b,
0 < b <= a is given by
A = 4.a.E(k')
= (aa - S).2.pi/M(a, b)
where a_0 = a, b_0 = b, c_0 = aa - bb. I have not verified if this works.
Given some example inputs and outputs of a pure function, search for it in a library.
Inspired by Hoogle, and a Hoogle-like type search on the types of the inputs and outputs will likely be a first filtering step.
Many unsolved devilish details.
Consider for example James Holmes, the Aurora, CO shooter. Is he one of us, or not one of us?
Notice how powerful this sociological, instinctive, group membership thought reflex is, then realize, anyone who can manipulate that reflex has tremendous power over how you think and act.
Inspired by the mass leap to conclusion: he must be mentally insane, so clearly not one of us.
Consider peer-to-peer distribution of content. Popular content is cached by many others, so your cost of hosting it (server activity and bandwidth) are low. Unpopular content (a "dislike" button), causes your server to be the only one hosting it, so expensive.
This provides a financial incentive to create good content even with, especially with, P2P.
We prohibit powerful weapons and other destructive implements (high explosives) in the hands of common people not because we fear them killing people (acting as if life is cheap), but because we fear change. Everyone is a stakeholder in the status quo.
To be granted permission to use such items, they need to show they will "responsibly" use them so as not to upset the status quo.
Not entirely clear if or when destruction actually causes social change (people's beliefs are pretty deep set): need historical study.
How can we prove or disprove the afterlife exists and functions the way Judeo-Christian religions portray it to: the bad are punished, the good rewarded?
We need a communication mechanism from the afterlife to this life. That communications channel currently takes the form of prophets who deliver messages, visions, of the afterlife to us.
We can explain away prophetic visions by determining their neurological basis and ultimately showing how to artificially induce arbitrary messages into arbitrary people.
It disturbs me if people are making very important life-altering decisions in this life based on extremely scant evidence of their effect in the afterlife. It seems far more likely to be a completely human-invented mechanism for controlling people. Actions ought to reflect that uncertainty, but the theory of utilities fails according to Pascal's Wager.
Two ancillary characters are engaged in deep thought over a chess game. A main character shows up and rudely but casually reaches in and makes the winning move, establishing how intelligent the character is. The opponent immediate resigns by tipping over his king, because that's the way chess resignation always happens in movies.
Let the position on the board be from one of those monstrously long computer-generated tablebase endgames, often with unique winning moves that defy any sort of mortal logic.
Breakthrough is an elegant game with simple rules that can be played on a chess board. Both sides start with only with pawns (typically 16 each on the first two ranks). First to promote, wins.
Capture like chess pawns, only diagonally. No two-step initial move (consequently no en passant). The one critical difference: pawns can also move diagonally forward as well as forward one square.
Invented by Troyka.
For avoiding death by opening theory like Chess960, consider only starting with only 13 pieces each (on 2 ranks): Binomial(16,13). or 16 pieces (on 3 ranks): B(24,16) or restrict to exactly 2 pawns per file: 3^8.
What board shapes (not necessarily rectangular) is the game guaranteed not to end in a draw? Consider general graphs: probably need directed acyclic graphs.
All positions (given in FEN notation) white to move.
KRRPKQ mate in 253 moves. Promote the c2 pawn (sacrificing one rook), converting to KQRKQ.
q7/7k/8/6R1/8/8/2P2R2/K7 w - - 0 1
KQRKQ mate in 67
8/8/8/8/q7/6k1/8/KR5Q w - - 0 1
KRPKR mate in 74. Advance the g2 pawn. Converts to KRK (maybe others which convert to KQKR)
k7/8/8/8/8/4R3/6P1/1K5r w - - 0 1
KQPPKQ mate in 182. Promote the a2 or h3 pawns. Eventually becomes KQPKQ.
8/4k3/8/Q7/8/7P/P7/q1K5 w - - 0 1
KPPKP mate 127. White has doubled pawns e3 and e4; black has b4 pawn. Quickly becomes KQPKQ.
8/8/8/8/1p2P3/4P3/1k6/3K4 w - - 0 1
KQPKQ mate in 124. Promote the e2 pawn.
4Q3/8/7q/8/8/8/k3P3/2K5 w - - 0 1
KQKRP mate in 104. Capture black f3 pawn, converting to KQKR.
8/Q7/K7/5r2/5p2/8/6k1/8 w - - 0 1
KQPKQP mate in 151. White h6 pawn versus black c6 pawn. Converts to KQPKQ.
8/3q4/2p4P/8/7Q/1k6/8/K7 w - - 0 1
KPPKPP mate in 141. White pawns f5, h6; Black c3, e6. Quickly converts to KQPKQP with h6 and c3 pawns.
8/8/2p4P/5P2/1k6/4p3/K7/8 w - - 0 1
KQRKQR mate in 117. Converts to KQKR.
4q3/7R/8/4r2Q/8/4k3/8/2K5 w - - 0 1
KBBPKR mate in 180. Advance the g2 pawn.
2B5/4Br2/K1k5/8/8/8/6P1/8 w - - 0 1
KQKBB mate in 81
8/1Q6/8/8/2bb4/8/3k4/K7 w - - 0 1
KQKNN mate in 72
8/8/8/8/4n2Q/3k4/8/3K3n w - - 0 1
KQKRN mate in 69. Converts to KQKR.
8/5Q2/8/n7/8/4k3/8/3K2r1 w - - 0 1
KBBKNP mate in 131. Capture the black b4 pawn and convert to KBBKN
K7/8/8/k7/Bp6/7n/7B/8 w - - 0 1
Some classic ones:
KQKR mate in 35
8/8/8/8/2r5/8/2k5/K6Q w - - 0 1
KNNKP mate in 115. The extra pawn prevents stalemate. Would be nice to have longest checkmates for each file the pawn can be in. (Troitzky line)
1N6/8/p7/8/8/8/2k1N3/K7 w - - 0 1
KRBKR mate in 65. (Cochrane)
8/3B4/8/1R6/5r2/8/3K4/5k2 w - - 0 1
KBBKN mate in 78. (Kling Horwitz)
7B/6n1/8/6k1/6B1/8/8/K7 w - - 0 1
Some (supposedly) elementary:
KBNK mate in 33
8/8/7N/8/8/8/8/K1k1B3 w - - 0 1
KRKP mate in 26. Black pawn on d5.
8/8/K7/3p4/8/3k4/4R3/8 w - - 0 1
KRKN mate in 40
8/2R5/8/8/7k/3K4/8/4n3 w - - 0 1
KRKB mate in 29
8/8/8/8/8/2R5/8/3K1bk1 w - - 0 1
KQKP mate in 28. Black pawn on d2.
3Q4/3K4/8/8/8/3k4/3p4/8 w - - 0 1
KQKN mate in 21
8/8/8/8/8/2k5/2n5/KQ6 w - - 0 1
KQKB mate in 17
8/6Q1/8/4b3/3k4/8/8/K7 w - - 0 1
KQKQ mate in 13
8/8/8/8/8/8/8/qk1K2Q1 w - - 0 1
Some monsters:
KRNKNN mate in 262. Discovered by Stiller, also with KRBKNN (mate in 238).
6k1/5n2/8/8/8/5n2/1RK5/1N6 w - - 0 1
8/8/8/8/2n2k2/2n5/5BR1/1K6 w - - 0 1
KQNKRBN convert in 517. Bourzutschky and Konoval.
8/1r6/8/6n1/5k2/1b6/3K3N/7Q w - - 0 1
KQPKRBN mate in 549. Lomonosov tablebase.
1n1k4/6Q1/5KP1/8/7b/1r6/8/8 w - - 0 1
All but the last two positions were selected from Kryukov's longest checkmates page based on 6-man Nalimov tablebases. Some flaws: KRNKBB has same-colored bishops. Lots of underpromotions, e.g., KRPKBB, KBBKP and KBBKPP to knight, KRPPKQ to rook. KNNKPP is empty. Positions maximizing distance to conversion would be nice, especially for currently quick conversions like KPPKPP.
What happens if these endgames are played on larger boards? The 4-piece ones may be doable.
Olympic badminton offers an analogy to what went wrong in the financial system. The participants committed immoral actions, but the system was set up to encourage such actions, greatly increasing the chances of winning. Perhaps even, it was the only way to win. Are those badminton players bad people?
Lessig: institutional corruption. Different from individual corruption.
What's wrong with politics.
Game theory.
Hypothesize that, even though egregiously politically incorrect, a heterosexual human will prefer a homophobic mate, all other things being equal. This could be tested by some clever psychology experiment that reveals how people behave when political correctness is not a factor.
It might explain the paradoxical nature of gay bashing. The subconscious evolutionary mechanism could be homophobia signals heterosexuality and so the mate is more likely to remain faithful: 50% of the population is eliminated as people the mate might stray to. A successful actual act of gay bashing signals being physically stronger than someone of the same sex.
Consider a society with regularly scheduled, periodic anarchy. Perhaps a day, once every few years, there are no punishments for crimes committed.
Crimes are still tried in court, but no punishment is handed out. The justice system seeks the truth.
The other reason for seemingly pointless trials is because the anarchy is periodic. The state might not punish, but in the next iteration of anarchy, vigilantes have concrete justification for revenge.
The ultimate goal is to level the highly unequal power structures that develop over time, though I am skeptical that this will work.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, like clockwork, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
You gossip privately to a friend: "Don't buy an Apple iPhone. It breaks too easily. There's a reason why it's nicknamed the diePhone."
In spreading these rumors, you cause financial damage to Apple: your friend might not buy an iPhone because of you. Ignoring the practicalities of capturing the conversation, shouldn't Apple be able to sue you both to recover the damages you've caused and to disincentivize such gossiping? Certainly Apple owns trademarks on the names "Apple" and "iPhone", and when you used these names in conversation, you have cheapened these brands, the very thing trademarks are supposed to protect.
Of course not: gossip is, and should remain, unregulated, protected by the freedom of speech. Trademarks may protect some uses of a name, but not this, not in gossip.
This is a counterargument to: copyright infringement by peer-to-peer file-sharing causes harm, so therefore the intellectual property owners must be compensated for it.
Do you feel you are getting away with a crime when gossiping about Apple? Assuming not, it demonstrates that there is not even a moral foundation for where to draw the property line for intellectual property. The line has gotten drawn according to who has the most political power, not necessarily what is best for society.
"Harm" ultimately depends on where the property line is drawn.
We've become set in our ways and our thought about intellectual property, unable to imagine something different, unable to imagine that people actually did things differently at other times, and very dangerously, thinking that the current way is the only "right" way of doing it. The purpose of this essay is to explain how you can think otherwise, how you can imagine how things could be different.
In order to insert a fact into Wikipedia, it needs to get published in a reputable source. Not everybody has the resources and access to publish in such sources.
Create a market where those who want a good citation for a fact to exist can offer to pay those willing to put the effort into getting it published.
This could be used for good or for evil.
The most common use of the preprocessor is to test for the existence of a library function. A half-baked idea to bolt the capability directly into the language:
If exists a function "foo"...
If exists a function "foo" of type "Bar -> Baz" ...
If exists a function "foo" with no side effects which evaluates to Y on argument X ...
If exists function of type "Bar -> Baz", then bind it to the name "foo"...
We need to avoid "The next sentence is true. The previous sentence is false" circular reference paradoxes.
Because Wikipedia has tremendous influence on what and how people think, there is almost certainly serious fraud going on.
How?
What's the going price?
Make the mouse cursor move by subpixels, using antialiasing to depict motion. Any practical use?
Tell the fictional story of a rocket science pioneer with a supernatural ability to turn back time and avoid mistakes. This ability is important given the many ways you can accidentally blow yourself up experimenting with rockets.
How far do your eyes travel when reading a book? Linear distance in text.
Maybe 5 to 10 meters per page.
How to query?
How to search?
For example, find three mountains equally spaced in a row of descending height, viewed from the ocean.
Inspired by Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
A hotel provides you with video recording of your room while you were out to prove that housekeeping did nothing bad.
Trust, but verify.
Suppose drastic measures have been decided needed, and we decide to replicate the results of Genghis Khan and the Mongol empire as reported by Julia Pongratz, et al.: mass murder sustained over a century causes reforestation and global cooling.
Which people should be killed? High fossil fuel consumers? High population density areas to minimize the amount of murder effort (presumably nuclear weapons)? Areas where trees grow really fast (tropical)?
It's not just mere mass murder but mass murder sustained over a century or more. What kind of political structure can stay in place for so long despite likely opposition by all those who do not want to be killed?
Make it a game: level up from mere serial killer like so many first-person shooters to Genghis Khan, savior of the world. Each new level gives more power, but more problems.
Consider all the things for which you would prefer to remain anonymous. These point to flaws in society, for example, sexuality.
Some people have an easier time achieving anonymity, perhaps through privacy gained from wealth.
Write fiction. Perform two surveys. 1. How many have actually done what was depicted in the fiction? 2. Guess the results of survey 1.
Highlight fiction for which there is a large spread between surveys 1 and 2, particularly when 2 is an answer too low compared to reality.
Erotica
I worry about indoor air quality in (recent) highly insulated homes, completely sealed from outside air. So many household products are assumed to be safe in the miniscule amount of fumes they emit, so long as they are ventilated in an old-style house. In a new-style house, the fumes might accumulate over decades.
In an old-style house, convection and leaks will (I think) periodically renew all the air inside a house. (What time scale? Probably expressed in half-life.)
At what distance can a typical cat-toy laser pointer be safely viewed with the naked eye? At what distance is it too far away (attenuated by dispersion)?
How would one properly aim such a laser? Perhaps a scope attached to it. Note that the distance it can be seen is much greater than the distance its reflection can be seen from the source.
Any interesting quaint applications? (Other than free-space optical laser internet.)
Assuming some apocalyptic scenario, and we had to start from scratch, which order should technology be redeveloped? Build the tool needed to build the tool needed to build the desired thing. Create a map of dependencies. There may be multiple routes through the map.
Many games already pretend to do this, but try to do it for real.
Let the map remain useful if some technology survives: starting with some existing technology, achieve some technological goal.
There is difficulty in that there may be alternative routes to some technology different from the way this human civilization developed it. Propose alternate links; test them.
Of particular interest is what information (a form of technology) you have to start from. Mere knowledge of Maxwell's equations might give a millenium advantage. Does the map itself survive? It may be one of the most important documents, describing what's possible, and how to get there.