Comments by "zenith parsec" (@zenithparsec) on "Numberphile" channel.

  1. The "really big stick" method doesn't need an actual stick. I'm sure they knew the height of the mountain, and could use the angle to each end point from vertical from the top of the mountain and some other location they also knew the distance to, by sighting along a much shorter stick.
    8
  2. It seems to make it work you need to constrain the nodes. I think you'd just be doing the equivalent of blowing on it, possibly quite musically.
    4
  3. Some lines of the music parts are very quiet, and when you turn the volume up to hear them, suddenly booming voices deafen you. ;/
    4
  4. Can induction be proved without induction? I know it works, but what is the proof it works?
    2
  5. 5:30 This has a kind of Kolmogorov + busy beaver feeling -- It's like the reason you can't do it is because you have a membership rule which is a function that returns the members of that set (a generator, I guess), and the length of that function is finite. A "Busy Beaver" for a specific length is the universal Turing machine program of that many states which produces the largest output while still stopping eventually. These numbers get very big, very fast, but because you can copy the previous state machine and add one state that will always write a 1, move left and then run the copied part(for example), every length can get bigger, forever. The length of the output would also be an upper bound how much info you could get out for any UTM code of that length, otherwise that input would be the busy beaver for that length. If the membership rule function was implemented using a Turing machine (as a proxy for determining its Kolmogorov complexity), it's length something left a plausible distraction to pull anyone still reading this off the right track. I basically had the first 10 words before I started and if you read this far, sorry.
    1