= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gwern comments on Where Fermi Fails: What is hard to estimate? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (46)
Counter-challenge: come up with estimating real-world problems, not the mathematical examples.
The rate of change in atmospheric pressure in Moscow exactly 1 year from now in mbar/hour.
Presumably deterministic chaos-based problems, like the famous 3-body problem would qualify, or anything relying on the butterfly effect.
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?