Comments by "EebstertheGreat" (@EebstertheGreat) on "The Pigeon Hole Principle: 7 gorgeous proofs" video.

  1.  @steffahn  Yeah, that checks out.
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  2. So one magician got to see the five cards and the one picked, then had to arrange the remaining four cards while the other magician was off stage (or back turned or whatever)? How did you communicate the suit of the fifth card with just one bit of information? Wouldn't it require two bits for four suits?
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  3. What exactly is your definition of an "algorithm" for a Rubik's Cube? You seem to be claiming that reversibility is a property of all algorithms, which is obviously not the case. For instance, there is an algorithm to simplify fractions, and it will simplify both 2/4 and 3/6 to 1/2. This resembles real Rubik's Cube algorithms. A typical set of algorithms will take any unsolved cube to the solved state, so they are definitely not reversible. Is the "algorithm" here just a fixed sequence of moves that does not depend on the current state of the cube?
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  4. I don't read French very well, and that is made far harder by looking at a scan of an old, faded print that has an f nearly identical to its f. Is there a transcript of that page somewhere in plaintext? Or could someone who reads French tell me what it's about? It mentions Archimedes' famous paper "The Sand Reckoner" and discusses counting the number of grains of sand on beaches, deserts ("arenas"), and everywhere else. But I can't figure out what the actual riddle is about or where the pigeonhole principle comes in.
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  5.  @Mathologer  Are you sure? I couldn't find it. There is a link to a scan of the original book, but not to French plaintext or to a translation. There are many other links, but none of them look like English translations of Recreation Mathematique: Composee De Plusieurs Problemes Plaisants Et Facetieux.
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