Abdiel_Kavash
Abdiel_Kavash t1_izp49gc wrote
Reply to comment by Ishana92 in What is the difference between atomic, nuclear and hydrogen bombs? by something-stupid2134
Ah, I see. I interpreted "penetrating" as "passing through with relatively little interaction", not as "bullet penetrates a window".
Abdiel_Kavash t1_izp2uhh wrote
Reply to comment by ChemicalRain5513 in What is the difference between atomic, nuclear and hydrogen bombs? by something-stupid2134
If it can penetrate through buildings or armor, what makes it "stop" inside of a human?
Abdiel_Kavash t1_iyk8ppt wrote
Reply to comment by [deleted] in Do we have any compounds or materials on Earth that compared to the rest of the universe is incredibly rare? by SwordArtOnlineIsGood
That is not how it works. You can have an infinite number of events, out of which each event repeats only finitely many times.
Example: There are infinitely many natural numbers. Only one of them is equal to 2.
Abdiel_Kavash t1_irj7klm wrote
Reply to comment by houstoncouchguy in Is hangman a solved game? by TheSoapbottle
Just a minor note, in your example, JATO is not a valid result, because you had already eliminated T.
Even so, why should choosing the "most popular" letter be the optimal strategy? Letter frequencies (Etaoin Shrdlu) are based on a corpus of English texts. Naturally the distribution of words in these texts is not uniform. The reason "E" and "T" are so high is partly because they occur in the word "The". If the game is selecting words uniformly at random from a dictionary, surely the frequency distribution of letters is going to be dramatically different.
I would imagine that an optimal strategy would involve building some decision tree over the set of all n-letter words in a dictionary, in a way that you eliminate as many different words as possible with each failed guess. Quick googling told me there are about 20,000 six-letter and 35,000 seven-letter words in English (the number of 4- and 5-letter words is much smaller). If we can get even 2 bits of information out of every guess on average, we should be able to uniquely determine the hidden word.
Abdiel_Kavash t1_j16y2nl wrote
Reply to comment by PerspectivePure2169 in Under what circumstances does radiation cause things (the air, people, plants, etc.) to glow? by ForsakenWedding8062
> It works quite well for sci fi that there's something called the blue beam of death. That unshielded shine directly from a high intensity radiological source, if one is unwise or unlucky enough to look at it, causes the human eye to perceive it as blue.
Is it actually blue (as in, if you let it shine on a white wall, and you look at the wall from behind a sufficiently shielded, but transparent partition, would you see the wall as blue), or does it just literally burn your ocular nerves and your brain trying to make some sense of it interprets it as "the color blue"?