HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: shoham@ll.mit.edu (Daniel Shoham)
Subject: Re: Virtual reality puzzle
Organization: MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 92 08:13:28 GMT

In article <9881@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au> warwick@cs.uq.oz.au writes:
>tolman%asylum.cs.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Kenneth Tolman) writes:
>
>>  It is the year 2056, and the first perfect virtual reality simulators
>>have hit the market.  So you buy one, bring it home, and plug into it.
>
>>After a few days of fighting orcs, swinging through jungles and living
>>on Jupiter making peace with aliens you decide to visit your wife.
>
>>  So you unplug it, walk around the house ...
>
>>  What is a sure way to know if you are in the real world or the virtual
>>one?  That is the puzzle.
>
>
>Trivial:  Open up the VR machine in your Real/VR homes, and examine EVERY
>  component.  The VR machine cannot possibly store the details of its own
>  construction (where would it store them?).
>


There is no fundamental reason why a machine cannot store all the details of
its construction. The description of a component, say a memory cell, might
require great details, but if that component is used many times; then the
description need only be stored once, and the number of copies specified. For
instance, if it takes 10MB of data to fully describe the construction of a
1kB chip, it takes only a *little* over 10MB to describe the construction of
10,000 such chips (assuming the language used allows for loops).

This is not just a theoretical formulation. Living organisms are perfectly
capable of storing the details of their own construction (and even to
perform the construction of duplicates).


The puzzle has no satisfying answer. Assuming the VR machine only effects
my senses, and not my judgement or memory, I would try asking people (such
as the wife) questions that we both know the answer to but the VR machine
does not (what was our song, or the like). Since information about me (us)
was collected only in the past several years, I would aim my questions to
the period beforehand.

Anyway, it is not clear what my recourse should be if I find that I am
still plugged in, or if I should really care.


Newsgroups: rec.puzzles
From: tycchow@riesz.mit.edu (Timothy Y. Chow)
Subject: Re: Hofstadter:Riddle Sentence
Organization: None.  This saves me from writing a disclaimer.
Distribution: rec
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 92 21:16:06 GMT

In article <ULF.LUNDE.92Aug19182924@grim.kvatro.no> Ulf.Lunde@kvatro.no (Ulf Lunde) writes:

>I always took it to be a joke, assuming that no English word contains the
>letters "myxbl", and certainly not in that order!  

If order is not important, then we have "ambidextrously" and perhaps
"buxomly."
-- 
Tim Chow     tycchow@math.mit.edu
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs
30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh
only 1 1/2 tons.                               ---Popular Mechanics, March 1949
Newsgroups: rec.puzzles
From: keith@cco.caltech.edu (Keith Allan Schneider)
Subject: Re: ducks and foxes (SPOILER)
Keywords: ducks, foxes
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1992 04:31:32 GMT

dwr2560@zeus.tamu.edu (RING, DAVID WAYNE) writes:

>keith@cco.caltech.edu (Keith Allan Schneider) writes...
>>>Now the duck may swim out to (not including) a radius of r/a, while still
>>>keeping the fox exactly opposite the pond centre. Now for the duck to
>>>be able to escape we must have 4*(r-r/a) < pi*r <=> a < 4/(4-pi) ~= 4.65979
>> 
>>That's not right.  If a > pi + 1 = 4.14... then the fox can catch the duck.
>>Your 4 should be an "a."

>You're both wrong :-)

>4 should have been an a, but the fox still can't catch the duck (if the duck
>is clever! )

Well, we were assuming that both the fox and the duck use the best strategy
possible, and that their reaction times were instantaneous...

keith

Newsgroups: rec.puzzles
From: mblum@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu (Cerebus)
Subject: Re: How come? puzzles (SPOILER and new one)
Keywords: Does anyone have any?
Organization: Brandeis University
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 15:37:28 GMT

ct@dde.dk (Claus Tondering) writes:

>---- New one: -----------

>A man is pushing his car. He stops in front of a hotel and goes
>bankrupt. How come?

He was playing Monopoly (using the car token).  The hotel was on
Boardwalk and he couldn't afford the $2000 rent.

-- Matt
+------------------------------+------------------------------------------+
|  Matt "Matt" Blum            | Let's make George Bush the 33rd          |
|                              |     ex-President of the United States!   |
| mblum@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu  |                                          |
|                              | I am not politically incorrect.          |
|  (617)893-2820               | I am politically challenged.             |
+------------------------------+------------------------------------------+

Newsgroups: rec.puzzles
From: marshall@force.ssd.lmsc.lockheed.com (Bob Marshall)
Subject: Re: Homographs
Reply-To: marshall@force.ssd.lmsc.lockheed.com
Organization: LMSC, Sunnyvale, California
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 92 00:06:13 GMT

In article <1992Aug17.202237.6065@athena.mit.edu>, jimhsu@athena.mit.edu (Jimmy M.D. Hsu) writes:
>In article <1992Aug17.143530.10946@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>, gblanken@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Gerime P Blankenship) writes:
>|> 
>|>      How about these for a homograph that is a noun/adjective.
>|>      Stable (a place for horses)
>|>      Stable (what I am most of the time)
>
>Dunno.  I pronounce them the same.

There's some confusion here about what a homograph really is. The definitions
I have seen indicate that any pair of words which are spelled the same
but differ in either meaning, derivation, or pronunciation qualify as
a homograph. So "stable" is indeed a homograph. But what the original
poster was asking for was examples of homographs whereby the words differed 
in pronunciation. 

By the way, the above example is usually referred to as a homonym, a 
special case of a homograph. Another confusing term homophone, two words
that are pronounced the same but spelled differently (like "to" and "two").

=============================================================================
Bob Marshall                     \\     "It ain't age
Lockheed Missiles & Space Co.     \\     That makes me look this way
Sunnyvale, CA                      \\    It ain't the years, boys,
marshall@force.ssd.lmsc.lockheed.com\\   It's the miles"
"I tell the truth 'cept when I lie"  \\     - Chris LeDoux
=============================================================================
Newsgroups: rec.puzzles
From: jil@uts.uucp (Jamie Lubin)
Subject: Re: Homographs
Organization: Bellcore, Piscataway, NJ
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 92 16:27:48 GMT

In article <1992Aug14.160559.24593@cco.caltech.edu> keith@cco.caltech.edu (Keith Allan Schneider) writes:
>hamel@primate.wisc.edu (Ray Hamel) writes:
>
>
>>> I friend recently asked me for two homographs (words spelled the same
>>> but pronounced differently) where one was an adjective and the other a
>>> noun.  He swears there's only one.  I don't believe him, but I've yet to
>>> come up with another example.  
>>> 
>>> Rob DeLine
>
>>How about BASS?
>
>>BASS (noun) --the fish
>>BASS (adjective) -- as in bass violin
>
>How about lead (pb, the element) and lead (as in you lead, and I'll follow)?

For the adjective, lead as in lead singer, lead programmer, etc.
From: vreddy@pappus.uucp (Venkatesh Reddy)
Newsgroups: rec.puzzles
Subject: Re: Rhymes
Date: 15 Aug 92 03:48:27 GMT
Article-I.D.: das.1992Aug15.034827.8973
Organization: Aiken Computation Lab, Harvard University

In article <1992Aug14.200431.152696@ns1.cc.lehigh.edu> dsbb@ns1.cc.lehigh.edu (D. SPENCER BEECHER) writes:
>Can anyone out there rhyme month, hungry, angry or orange?
>

I dunno about the other three, but I know that ORANGE is a word with
the distinction of being "unrhymable" with any other proper English 
word. I always heard it was the ONLY word that way, which leads me to 
believe the others prolly have rhymes. But orange definitely does not.

>Anybody know words similarly difficult to rhyme?
>-- 
>                   _ _     _ _     _ _
>  -Spence         [O.O]   )x.x(   )O.O(
>                    O       O      -*-


-- Venk Reddy --
From: emru@CAM.ORG
Newsgroups: rec.puzzles
Subject: Re: Who pays for the drinks
Date: 19 Aug 92 11:41:11 GMT
Organization: Communications Accessibles Montreal, Quebec Canada

In article <1992Aug15.010836.28232@cs.cornell.edu> karr@cs.cornell.edu (David Karr) writes:
>In article <1992Aug14.191350.9259@javelin.sim.es.com> gfowler@javelin.sim.es.com (Gary Fowler) writes:
>>Pardon me for being olbique, but I just don't understand the problem.  It
>>seems that the premise for the puzzle is faulty.  It would be impossible
>>for the currency to be devalued on each side of the border.
>>
>>$1 M = $.9 US in America and $1 US = $.9 M in Mexico?  That equation just
>>doesn't compute for me.
>
>I think someone explained this already, but the official exchange
>rates for currency almost never match the exchange rates that you get
>in practice, at least in a free-market situation.  For one thing, if
>you're a bar owner and you need to pay your rent in US dollars, you
>will need to go to a money changer to convert any Mexican dollars you
>receive into US currency.  The money changer charges a percentage of
>the amount for her service, so if the official exchange rate is
>US$1.00 = Mex$1.00 then you might get US$0.97 for each Mexican dollar,
>and it's trouble for you as well, so you in turn give your customers
>only 90 cents value for each Mexican dollar.  The Mexican bartender
>does the same, only with the names "US" and "Mexican" interchanged.
>
>When I last visited Canada the exchange rate was maybe US$1.00 =
>Can$1.15, but establishments in Maine discounted Canadian currency at
>20%, so you spent Can$1.25 to buy a $1 beer.  On the Canadian side I
>got maybe Can$1.10 or less at the money-changing station.  (But you
>could do better by going directly to the banks, maybe Can$1.12, and if
>you bought gas at the Irving they gave MORE than Can$1.15 to the US
>dollar and gave your change in Canadian dollars that you could spend
>in a restaurant--such a deal!  They must have wanted either US
>currency or US tourist business a lot :-)
>
>So much for personal experience.  I never saw anyone give change in
>foreign currency, but why not, saves a trip to the money changer.

Your experience is what I assumed when I read the puzzle.

I have seen someone give change in foreign currency, but only once -
while bartering for some cloth in Kenya or Nigeria thirteen years ago.


==========================================================================
Emru Townsend        Fido: 1:167/133        emru@cam.org        BIX:switch
Q:  Do you know what the death rate around here is?    A:  One per person.
Newsgroups: rec.puzzles
From: stein@hal.nta.no (Stein Kulseth FBA)
Subject: re: Swallows
Keywords: technicality
Organization: Norwegian Telecom Research
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 92 11:14:43 GMT

In article <9816@ncrwat.Waterloo.NCR.COM>, tjgerman@53iss6.Waterloo.NCR.COM (Trevor German) writes:
|> 
|> 	The solution is that swallow A must simply slow down. Visa vis
|> 
|> 
|> 	If the two birds are each flying SOUTH on a PARALLEL course then
|> 	they must be flying south on the same line of longitude. 
|> 	
|> 	Since they can see each other they must be on the same side of 
|>         the planet, hence bird A is in front of B on the same course.
|> 
|> 	The answer is, therefore, that no course correction is needed, just
|> 	a speed change if nescessary.

This stuff is great!!! I love it, and I'm the originator of the puzzle!!!!
This wins the 'Most beatiful loophole of the month' contest! 

However, I am not satisfied with the other answer I have got on this puzzle,
which bogged the poor swallow down with unnecessary range estimates 
equations and trigonometry.

So I hereby restate the puzzle:
A swallow(A) is flying south. It then spots another swallow(B) flying behind
it, but some distance to the right on a parallell course due south. Ie:

                       (A)
- - - - - - - - - - - - => - - - - - - - - - - - -


- - - - - - - - - => - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
                 (B)

Now A wants to intercept B in order to pick up the latest swallow gossip.
What change in direction should A make?

Estimates of unknown speeds and estimates takes time. The earth is *flat*
and the swallows may or may not be laden with coconuts
-- 
stein.kulseth@nta.no (Norwegian Telecom Research)
   'When murders are committed by mathematics, they can be solved by
   mathematics. Most of them aren't, and this one wasn't'
   - Nick Charles (Dashiell Hammett's "The Thin Man")
From: asimov@wk223.nas.nasa.gov (Daniel A. Asimov)
Newsgroups: rec.puzzles
Subject: Little numerical puzzle
Date: 13 Aug 92 23:34:25 GMT
Organization: NAS, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA

PUZZLE:
Find a closed-form solution for x in the following equation:

         2
	x  + log  (2x) = 3
		10

I will post the solution in a few days.


--Dan Asimov
asimov@nas.nasa.gov

Mail Stop T045-1
NASA Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, CA 94035-1000
(415) 604-4799
Newsgroups: rec.puzzles
From: karr@cs.cornell.edu (David Karr)
Subject: Re: Alien Rod 
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY 14853
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 17:48:32 GMT

In article <1992Aug13.012348.18846@b11.b11.ingr.com> kiick@b11.b11.ingr.com (chris kiick) writes:
>Given that we can represent the enclyclopedia as a large number or fraction,
>what if we used a REALLY compact form of numeric notation?
>
>Something like
>          (b!+c)            b
>	a^      +d   Or   a^ ![c]+d
>
>(note: x![n] is meant to represent x! n times. ie  x![4] = x!!!!)
>
>Which with four carefully chosen numbers could represent a HUGE number.

I take it you mean four carefully choses SMALL numbers.  So each of
your four numbers lies in a relatively small range, say 1..100 for
example.  (So to represent these numbers accurately on the bar with
one mark, you need to be able to measure length along the bar to
1/(100^4), i.e. 1 part in 100 million, or 1/100th of a micron if the
bar is one meter long.)

Then with these four variables you can represent a total of 100 million
different numbers.  Suppose the encyclopedia could be coded in a string
of just one million digits.  (That's a very small encyclopedia--just
500 pages of 2000 characters each if you encode one character per digit.)
Now there are 10 to the 1,000,000th power different possible encodings
that the encyclopedia might have.  The alien has a formula that can
generate a short encoding for 10 to the 8th power of these.  So there
is only a 1 in 10 to the 999,992nd power chance that the encoding of the
encyclopedia is one of the few that the alien can represent.

You suggest that there are many different formulas that you could use,
but if you allow the alien to use any of the 10 to the whatever power
(at least 10 to the 999,992nd power) different formulas that are
needed to "hit" all the large number values, he or she also needs to
encode which formula was used.  Now just recording a number from 1 to
10 to the 999,992nd power to specify which formula is used is about as
hard as recording the encyclopedia in the first place.  And any other
scheme for specifying the formula, e.g. an encoding of its symbols, is
bound to be even worse.

Essentially what you are trying to do is to use data compression to
reduce an arbitrary volume of text the size of an encyclopedia down to
just a few characters.  There are texts for which this might be done,
for example the fictitious volume whose text is, "See Figure 1 for the
first 10,000,000 decimal digits of pi," the rest of the book being
occupied by Figure 1.  Now you see you could (in principle) reproduce
the entire text of this 10,000,000-plus character book from the fewer
than 200 characters it took me to describe it.  You will have a hard
time convincing me that any encyclopedia is such a text.

-- David Karr (karr@cs.cornell.edu)
From: tjgerman@53iss6.Waterloo.NCR.COM (Trevor German)
Newsgroups: rec.puzzles
Subject: virtual reality
Date: 19 Aug 92 13:24:40 GMT
Organization: Imaging Systems Division, NCR Corp, Waterloo, Ont., CANADA


	Leave a marker.

	Before entering the virtual world environment leave a marker
	behind that the computer can not know. for example

		hide some item in a drawer,
		write a note on a piece of paper and
			stick it in your pocket,
		etc

	
--
       >| "Only average people           | Trevor J German BSc    |<
       >|       never make mistakes."    | NCR, Waterloo, Ontario |<
       >|	               	         | Canada.                |<
From: emru@CAM.ORG
Newsgroups: rec.puzzles
Subject: Re: Riddles
Date: 19 Aug 92 11:48:01 GMT
Organization: Communications Accessibles Montreal, Quebec Canada

In article <1992Aug14.213109.16597@awdprime.austin.ibm.com> lhmaddox@netmail.austin.ibm.com writes:
>12 D in a G

12 Dozen in a Gross

>26 L in the A

26 Letters in the Alphabet

==========================================================================
Emru Townsend        Fido: 1:167/133        emru@cam.org        BIX:switch
Q:  Do you know what the death rate around here is?    A:  One per person.
Newsgroups: rec.puzzles
From: keith@cco.caltech.edu (Keith Allan Schneider)
Subject: Re: Slaughter of the Innocents
Keywords: puzzle Bible New Testament
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 23:08:15 GMT

asymes@nl.oracle.com (Andy Symes) writes:

>This is one I saw in an old puzzle book.

>After King Herod had completed his sluaghter of the innocents, all the little
>children were buried in a mound of earth with just their feet sticking out.
>How do we know which were boys and which were girls???

Did the girls paint their toenails?  heh heh

keith
From: sfleming@cs.hw.ac.uk (Stewart Fleming)
Newsgroups: rec.puzzles
Subject: Re: Riddles
Date: 18 Aug 92 13:21:10 GMT
Reply-To: sfleming@cs.hw.ac.uk
Organization: Computer Science Dept, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh


One of the Psychology Profs here told me of an example similar to
this that he used to use in teaching basic Psychology.

Lecturing, he would state "The human perceptual system can
still make sense of sentences..." and then write on a blackboard
"whn ll th vwls hv bn mttd".  He said it was quite entertaining to
watch the faces of the class as they worked out what was going on...

The riddles in this thread seem to follow a similar theme;
question: does it work as well with numbers ?  [I know numeric sequences
are used in intelligence tests.]

STF
--
sfleming@cs.hw.ac.uk                        ...ukc!cs.hw.ac.uk!sfleming
Errata: For "He shows promise as a software engineer",
   read "He is a very promising software engineer."
Newsgroups: rec.puzzles
From: karr@cs.cornell.edu (David Karr)
Subject: Re: Virtual reality puzzle
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY 14853
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 1992 20:34:19 GMT

In article <78155@ut-emx.uucp> steppe@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Top Changwatchai) writes:
>I've followed the argument for the creation of the universal Turing machine
>(and seen an "example" of one in Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind").
>However, there seems to be a difference between the theoretical and practical
>mappings between the VR machine and a perfect Turing machine:  efficiency.

In theory, all computers built today are only as "powerful" as a
Turing machine--in terms of the richness of their behavior--but nobody
builds Turing machines; they build machines that run a lot faster.
Any argument using Turing machines is not going to discuss efficiency
in practical terms.  (Mine was strictly about the POSSIBILITY of a
machine having complete self-knowledge.)

>If the machine could simulate reality (and not just a strictly limited
>orc adventure) in real time, then why doesn't the company just develop
>one that would predict the future?  They'd make a fortune.

Heh heh.  The same argument can be made to ask why, with a
supercomputer at my disposal, can't I tell you whether it is going to
be raining in Ithaca at 5:00 pm exactly two weeks from today?  Part of
the answer is called the "butterfly effect."  The idea is that a
butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo can make the difference as to
whether it rains in New York several days later.  This may be an
exaggeration, but we are surrounded by chaotic systems (like the
weather) in which the smallest perturbation in starting conditions
(equivalent to the roundoff error on a measuring instrument) can lead
to enormous changes in a later state.  The VR machine, having
(necessarily) imperfect input data, cannot predict the course of such
a system accurately.  It could, however, do a very convincing job in
the absenceof any reality check.  If you can't see the weather outside
because you're in a simulation, and the weather is unpredictable, how
are you going to prove the VR machine wrong when it says it's raining
out?

Oh, let's not forget that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, not
some mere shortcoming in current technology, prevents us from knowing
the current state of the world perfectly.  Add to that all the
unpredictable things like particle decay, which are effectively 
random, and there is no way the VR machine can predict the future.

-- David Karr (karr@cs.cornell.edu)
Newsgroups: rec.puzzles
From: shari@room.Princeton.EDU (Shari L. Landes)
Subject: Re: Riddles
Originator: news@nimaster
Organization: Princeton University
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 15:09:38 GMT

Great... everyone who has posted got them right...  here's the ones that
are left...

7 	C in a R
12	N on an A C
3	C on a T L
7	D in a L T N (A)
200	S of P in a R
88	C in the S
9	D in a Z C (with the S C)

Harlan Landes.Gates of Dawn BBS.609-426-1618.WWVnet 1@6916


-- 
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          Only the ephemeral is of lasting value--Ionesco
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Newsgroups: rec.puzzles