Supergrunch

Rosie Baker. Though I never knew her all that well.

Weird connections like that freak me out. The other day I noticed a girl from my school had Molly in her facebook friends.

My house (i.e. my parents' one, not at university) gets mice occasionally, despite various solutions. I think we got proper pest control people in when I was a lot younger, but that involves poison and ick so now my dad catches them with humane traps filled with raisins then lets them out in the field. It's surprisingly effective - there only ever seems to be one or two at a time. But yeah, they apparently stink when you have a look at them in the traps. Also they can do serious damage to the dust jackets of books.

Yep... it's annoying, it should be fun but I just can't be arsed right now. I feel like sleeping for a week or so. Ah well, must get on.

Exactly the same situation here.

Happy birthday chaps.

Is nobody getting any further? How about a hint:

Exactly. Surely everything is "natural", whether man-made or otherwise. That's not really what Fish is saying - he's just suggesting that things that things that are proven to work (including both apparently cranberry juice and stuff like paracetamol) are better than "herbal remedies", which are usually given that label because of their lack of scientific backing.

Deadly nightshade is a plant, ricin comes from a bean... I've never been entirely sure what "nature" is supposed to be anyway.

Which isn't to say that this is all is nonsense, just that it's better to use stuff that's actually proven to work, and no, a long history of use isn't evidence here. And if you do take this stuff, make sure you tell your doctor that you're doing so...

Lol, you're presumably joking. This is about the kind of programming underlying functions like ctrl+f.

Next puzzle! This one actually has practical applications. Imagine you're writing the program for a computer to search a block of text for a particular sequence of characters (or string). Let's assume we're using a large but finite alphabet, which includes letters, numbers, spaces, unicode twaddle, etc. Thus we can view the text as a sequence of these characters, and we want to find a given string in this sequnce. The most obvious way to do this is as follows: Check the first letter - does it match with the first letter of the string? (i) Yes - does the second letter match with the second letter of the string? (ii) No - move along one position and check the second letter - does this match with the first letter of the string? And basically repeat this process until the string is found or the whole text has been searched. An example of this: Here's our text (it's short, for convenience): GARLIC AND SAPPHIRES IN THE MUD CLOT THE BEDDED AXLE-TREE We're searching for the string "CLOT". Here's what happens: GARLIC AND SAPPHIRES IN THE MUD CLOT THE BEDDED AXLE-TREE CLOT The first letter gets checked, but it's not the same as the first letter of "CLOT", so we move along. GARLIC AND SAPPHIRES IN THE MUD CLOT THE BEDDED AXLE-TREE _CLOT Neither is the second letter, so we move along again, and so on. When we come across the first "C", however: GARLIC_AND SAPPHIRES IN THE MUD CLOT THE BEDDED AXLE-TREE _____CLOT We have a match! So we check the following character, but it's a space (marked with an underscore so I can colour it) rather than an "L", so we move on again. But when we get to "CLOT", everything matches, and so we've found the string: GARLIC AND SAPPHIRES IN THE MUD CLOT THE BEDDED AXLE-TREE _______________________________CLOT Anyway, that's the idea of this process. The question, however, is whether you can think of a more efficient way of doing things - do all the letters have to be checked?

Yep, you guys have both got it. What the green eyed person says is important because he lets the people know that everyone knows there is someone with blue eyes, including people in the hypothetical cases, which is important for the hypothetical situation of there only being one blue eyed person.

Because there's no other way to determine their own eye colour. If there are n blue eyed people, then they all have to wait n-1 days to rule out there only being n-1 blue eyed people. In the original case, a given blue eyed person realises that everyone is either seeing 99 other people (like him), or (if he doesn't have blue eyes), 98. There's no way of ruling out there being 98 people without thinking about the reasoning that would go on in that situation, and so everyone has to wait to ensure that the embedded hypotheticals are false. Yep.

Basically, each blue eyed person takes the 98 person case as a null hypothesis, then investigates this, realising that each of the putative 98 people would have to be imagining the 97 person case, each of whom would be imagining the 96 person case... And this line of reasoning goes all the way down the the one person case where it's obvious.

(you got your quotation attribution wrong) Anyway' date=' there is a decent reason for this. I'll explain the 7 person case for people (3 blue, 3 brown, 1 green):

Have a think about the 7 person case (3 brown, 3 blue, 1 green), and see where that gets you.

For the hats problem: If both B and A have red hats, C must have a blue hat and so will say so, vice versa if B and A both have blue hats. So these scenarios are straightfoward, now let's consider a mixed case (i.e. where B and A have hats of different colours): The first thing to note is that if C says nothing, B and A will know the case is mixed. Thus if B sees that A has a blue hat, he will know his hat is the other colour and thus red, and will be able to say so, and vice versa if A has a red hat. Thus the prisoners will always be able to escape: if B and A have hats of the same colour, C will know what colour hat he has and thus will say so, and if B and A have hats of different colours, they will be able to infer this fact from C's lack of talking, and then by looking at A's hat B will know his hat colour. Edit: Yeah, same solution as will'.

No' date=' the green eyed person [i']only[/i] makes the statement on the first day, and never again. And as I stated in the first post with the problem, the people aren't aware of the proportions of eye colours on the island. So a given blue eyed person can see one person with green eyes, 99 with blue, and 100 with brown, but as far as they know, their own eyes could be any of these colours or something else entirely. However, the statement made by the green eyed person somehow changes this.

Correct. But why?

Belated birthdayness!

That's precisely what I'd do if it were my wedding. I've had this essay on Old Japanese hanging over me for weeks now, and I finally have to get it written today. Gah, it's so difficult to force myself to do it...

I guess so. Or you can just treat each day/night as a discrete entity.