Lvxferre [he/him]

The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

  • 3 Posts
  • 537 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • No, I only saw it after I solved the problem.

    my reasoning / thought process

    Initially I simplified the problem to one prisoner. The best way to reduce uncertainty was to split the bottles into two sets with 500 bottles each; the prisoner drinks from one, if he dies the poisonous wine is there, otherwise it’s in one of the leftover 500 bottles.

    Then I added in a second prisoner. The problem doesn’t give me enough time to wait for the first prisoner to die, to know which set had the poisonous wine; so I had to have the second prisoner drinking at the same time as the first, from a partially overlapping set. This means splitting the bottles into four sets instead - “both drink”, “#1 drinks it”, “#2 drinks it”, “neither drinks it”.

    Extending this reasoning further to 10 prisoners, I’d have 2¹⁰=1024 sets. That’s enough to uniquely identify which bottle has poison. Then the binary part is just about keeping track of who drinks what.


  • solution

    Number all bottles in binary, starting from 0000000000. Then the Nth prisoner drinks all wines where the Nth digit is “1”. have each prisoner drinking the wines where a certain digit is “1”.

    So for example. If you had 8 bottles and 3 prisoners (exact same logic):

    • number your wines 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111
    • Prisoner 1 drinks wines 100, 101, 110, 111; if he dies the leftmost digit of the poisoned wine is 1, if he lives the poisoned wine starts with 0
    • Prisoner 2 drinks wines 010, 011, 110, 111; if he dies the mid digit is 1, else it’s 0
    • Prisoner 3 drinks wines 001, 011, 101, 111; if he dies the right digit is 1, else it’s 0

    If nobody dies the poisoned wine is numbered 000. And if all die it’s the 111.



    1. It’s morally good when people access information, culture, and entertainment.
    2. It’s morally good when the author of a work gets rewarded by their work.

    Piracy is morally justified when 1 is a more pressing matter than 2. As such, it’s justified in situations like this:

    • If, in the absence of piracy, the pirate would still not pay for the goods - because #2 is set up to zero (the author of the work is not rewarded anyway).
    • If it’s impossible to obtain the goods without piracy. For example, abandonware.
    • If the author of the work would get breadcrumbs of the money used to access legally the goods, and the pirate compensates the author directly (e.g. donation).








  • If by “a little toxicity” you mean a little bit of aggressiveness, sarcasm, etc., I agree with you. It depends a lot on the community though - in some, allowing it will be counter-productive.

    If however you mean harassment and hate speech, as the author of the text, I strongly disagree. If the mod doesn’t curb down those things, they might not be “lording” over the discourse, but other users are - because

    • users shut each other up through harassment
    • hate speech silences whole groups, as they leave the community

    Another detail is that you don’t need to control the discourse to curb down harassment, since it’s only behavioural and not discursive in nature.

    So IMO when it comes to those two things the problem is not overzealous mods, but dumb ones not doing due diligence, who are a bit too eager to falsely accuse their own users to be voicing hate speech or harassing each other when it is not the case.

    [Sorry for the wall of text.]