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This seems highly exploitable.
Anyone here want to try to use these bogus numbers to get a publisher to market their own fanfiction?
In response to
Fifty Shades of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
I wrote what could best be described as a proto-rationalist Sailor Moon fanfic. Bear in mind that it's really old--I last worked on it around 2000 and it predates even HPMOR. It doesn't try to sell rationalism, but it has Sailor Moon do things that make sense. I never finished it but I got to the Doom Tree story. http://www.rahul.net/arromdee/fanfic.html
What do you mean by censorship here? Can you give examples?
They would not have pages about works that were primarily sexual, because the advertisers prohibited it.
I recall them deleting/jettisoning the "troper tales" (specifically, troper tales:fetish fuel) section of the site some time ago because some of the content was extremely disturbing.
(youtube search for people doing dramatic readings of them, some of them are pretty funny if you have a high cringe tolerance)
https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Troper_Tales
The fork decided not to bring the troper tales back, for just that reason.
In response to
Open thread, 9-15 June 2014
It was suggested I post here, but there's a TV Tropes fork at https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki . It uses mediawiki software and gets rid of the censorship at TV Tropes. (I suspect this one will never get rid of the strikeout tag for dubious reasons.)
It looks childish to me. its looks the same as x-treme.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XMakesAnythingCool
I guess its just me, and its of no real consequence. But it seems to trivialize such a serious subject as existential risk.
Since you invoked TV Tropes, there's a TV Tropes fork at https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/ . It gets rid of the censorship at TV Tropes and also uses mediawiki, which makes things work better--you have real categories, it is possible to edit sections, etc.
Given that the only indenting style 99%+ of programmers agree on is "the same style that the rest of the project uses", failing to adhere to the style used is a fairly egregious faux pas and possibly indicative of a disregard for standards and/or lack of attention to context within the program, raising red flags about possible bugs introduced by the patch.
In any case, the correct response would be to reformat your code (any sane code editor can do this with one command) and resubmit the patch.
The point is not that free software programmers specifically refuse to accept wrongly indented code, the point is that they often refuse to accept code based on wholly arbitrary reasons. Arguing that indentation really isn't an arbitrary reason is fighting the hypothetical; replace it in your mind with something that is.
There's also the "we won't accept this bug report unless it fits this list of arbitrary requirements" gambit (if you actually do manage to submit the bug report following all the requirements, it will still get ignored anyway, but doing it this way they can artificially deflate the number of unfixed bugs and blame things on the user for not following the directions)
Well, you don't have to throw one out. You could interpret the constraints (which are quoted correctly, btw) as narrowing the set of legitimate questions to those which Random can answer both truthfully and falsely with "da" or "ja". I'm not sure why Boolos would have that constraint in there unless it was to rule out the kind of solution you're proposing. Still, I agree the problem is clumsily phrased.
Maybe the question could be patched by adding the possibility that the gods (including Random) don't respond at all, but also changing Random's behavior from "randomly answers truthfully or falsely" to "randomly says either 'da', 'ja' or nothing". If you patch it in this way, I'm pretty sure a two-question solution isn't possible.
ETA: Also, I don't want to downplay the cleverness of your two-question solution. Whether or not it perfectly fulfills the constraints of the problem, it is still very nice.
The patched version requires three questions. In fact it requires asking three people--if you only ask two people any number of questions, Random could pretend that he is the other person and the other person is Random.
First of all, you need a question which lets you determine who any person B is, when asked of Truth.
You want to ask "if B is Truth, then yes, else if B is False, then no, else don't answer". Presumably, you can't directly ask someone not to answer--they can only refuse to answer if they are Random or if yes/no would violate constraints, so this comes out to "if B is Truth, then yes, else if B is False, then no, else tell me if your answer to this question is 'no'."
Then you modify this question so that it can be asked either of Truth or False. As before, adding "tell me if the answer to Y is the truthfulness of your answer to this question" will produce a correct answer to a yes/no question from either True or False, so you get "tell me, in the case that B is not Random, if the answer to "if B is Truth, then yes, else no" is the truthfulness of the answer to your question, and in the case that B is Random, if your answer to this question is the negation of the truthfulness of your answer to this question'".
You now have a question that can determine who one person is, when asked of either True or False.
(The version with da and ja is left as an exercise to the reader.)
Use that question to ask person 1 who person 3 is. Then use it to ask person 2 who person 3 is.
If 1 and 2 give the same answer, then they are either Truth or False giving an informative answer or Random imitating an informative answer. Either way you know the identity of 3, and you also know one non-Random person. Ask this non-Random person the question to find the identity of a second person, which gives you all three.
If 1 and 2 give different answers, then one of them is Random. In that case, you know that 3 is not Random, and you can ask 3 who 1 is. You now know the identity of 1, and you know whether 1 or 2 is Random; the non-Random one told you who 3 was, so you have the identity of 3 as well. This again gives you the identity of two people and so you have all three.
Nice! Although, as you mention, your two-question solution doesn't work given the constraints imposed by Boolos (or Smullyan). Still, very clever.
your two-question solution doesn't work given the constraints imposed by Boolos
If the above is quoted correctly, the constraints imposed by Boolos are contradictory. It is not possible that 1) Random always answers truthfully or falsely and 2) Random always answers "da" or "ja". So the fact that I had to throw out the latter constraint is of no import--since the constraints are contradictory, I had no choice but to throw one out.
In response to
Book Review: Computability and Logic
Another book by George Boolos, Logic, Logic, and Logic presents (and solves) what he calls "the hardest logic puzzle ever." The puzzle was created by Raymond Smullyan. Here it is, for those of you who like this sort of thing:
Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for "yes" and "no" are "da" and "ja," in some order. You do not know which word means which.
Here's some more relevant information from the book:
It could be that some god gets asked more than one question (and hence that some god is not asked any question at all).
What the second question is, and to which god it is put, may depend on the answer to the first question. (And of course similarly for the third question.)
Whether Random speaks truly or not should be thought of as depending on the flip of a coin hidden in his brain; if the coin comes down heads, he speaks truly; if tails, falsely.
Random will answer da or ja when asked any yes-no question.
Lurker, but I just had to post here. A version of this was posted on The Big Questions in July. Here is my answer, pasted from there (but modified to use the different names), which beats the given answer because it uses two questions.
Let Y be “is the answer to X ‘da’”. If they respond ‘da’, that’s equivalent to saying ‘yes’ to X, and if they respond ‘ja’, that’s the equivalent of saying ‘no’ to X. This is the case even if they said ‘yes’ or ‘no’ because they lied.
“Tell me whether the correct answer to Y is the truthfulness of your answer to this question” will produce the answer to Y from anyone (True, False, or Random). You can ask it three times (with X being various ‘are you a _’) and get correct yes/no answers all three times, which is enough to tell 6 combinations apart.
If you want to do better than that you need more than one bit per answer, which is possible by asking a question that Random cannot answer with either a yes or a no. Use a disjunction. “Tell me, in the case that you are not Random, whether the correct answer to Y is the truthfulness of your answer to this question, and in the case that you are Random, whether your answer to this question is the negation of the truthfulness of your answer to this question” will get an answer to Y from True or False, and no answer from Random. If X is ‘are you True’ and Y is the da version from above, then the entire question will be answered ‘da’ by True, ‘ja’ by False, and not at all by Random. This provides an obvious way to do it in 2 questions.
(break for formatting)
Whether Random speaks truly or not should be thought of as depending on the flip of a coin hidden in his brain; if the coin comes down heads, he speaks truly; if tails, falsely.
Random will answer da or ja when asked any yes-no question.
These two are not equivalent. The first of these allows you to exploit the fact that some yes-no questions cannot be answered truthfully or falsely, allowing the answer above. The second does not, and implies that some answers from Random are neither true nor false.
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I know; I know; I know. This is exactly what makes this topic so frustratingly difficult to explain, and so convenient to ignore.
The thing I am trying to say is that if a real monster would come to this community, sufficiently intelligent and saying the right keywords, we would spend all our energy inventing alternative explanations. That although in far mode we admit that the prior probability of a monster is nonzero (I think the base rate is somewhere around 1-4%), in near mode we would always treat it like zero, and any evidence would be explained away. We would congratulate ourselves for being nice, but in reality we are just scared to risk being wrong when we don't have convincingly sounding verbal arguments on our side. (See Geek Social Fallacy #1, but instead of "unpleasant" imagine "hurting people, but only as much as is safe in given situation".) The only way to notice the existence of the monster is probably if the monster decides to bite you personally in the foot. Then you will realize with horror that now all other people are going to invent alternative explanations why that probably didn't happen, because they don't want to risk being wrong in a way that would feel morally wrong to them.
I don't have a good solution here. I am not saying that vigilantism is a good solution, because the only thing the monster needs to draw attention away is to accuse someone else of being a monster, and it is quite likely that the monster will sound more convincing. (Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.) Actually, I believe this happens rather frequently. Whenever there is some kind of a "league against monsters", it is probably a safe bet that there is a monster somewhere at the top. (I am sure there is a TV Tropes page or two about this.)
So, we have a real danger here, but we have no good solution for it. Humans typically cope with such situations by pretending that the danger doesn't exist. I wish we had a better solution.
https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Hired_to_Hunt_Yourself