gwern comments on Where Fermi Fails: What is hard to estimate? - Less Wrong

6 Post author: tgb 05 June 2012 03:15AM

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Comment author: gwern 05 June 2012 03:38:20AM 11 points [-]

Counter-challenge: come up with estimating real-world problems, not the mathematical examples.

Comment author: faul_sname 05 June 2012 04:36:03PM *  4 points [-]

The rate of change in atmospheric pressure in Moscow exactly 1 year from now in mbar/hour.

Comment author: shminux 05 June 2012 04:24:26AM 3 points [-]

Presumably deterministic chaos-based problems, like the famous 3-body problem would qualify, or anything relying on the butterfly effect.

Comment author: tgb 06 June 2012 01:39:19AM *  0 points [-]

Edit: this was unintentionally redacted!! Is there a undo-the-redaction option?

Sally and John both play a videogame where their characters live on a circle. Starting next to Sally, John walks around the circle 10 to the 100th times (he is a known hacker). Sally hasn't moved and measures the position of John. Assuming that Sally is at the point (1,0) and John moves counter-clockwise, what is the slope of the trajectory of the projectile that John's character fires towards the center of the circle?

For a real one: what is the length of the coast of Britain? Perhaps this is ill-defined without giving a length-scale, but even with a scale (say, a meter) I'm not sure it's doable. Or similarly, what's the surface area of a convenient piece of broccoli?