The key insight is that this strategy causes there to be a strong correlation between the success of different prisoners.
As an example, let's say prisoner #10 opens his box and finds #21, then finds #5 in that box, then #84, then #51, then finally succeeds and finds his number 10 in box #51. These boxes form a cycle 10-21-5-84-51 (and then back to 10). Anyone who opens any of these boxes will eventually see the same set numbers that #10 did, so that means that we know prisoners #5, #10, #21, #51 and #84 will all succeed in finding their number by starting at their own box.
Compare that to the situation where they just randomly look in boxes and each independently have only a 50% chance to succeed - then the odds that those 5 prisoners all succeed would be (1/2)^5 = 1/32, or only about 3%. In every cycle containing n prisoners, instead of their success rate being (1/2)^n, now they all succeed together or all fail together.
Now that the success of every prisoner in the same cycle is perfectly correlated with each other, the prisoners' overall chance of success depends only on whether the random permutation created by the warden has any cycles >50 in length. If so, then everyone in that cycle will fail. If not, then all the cycles across the 100 boxes are short enough that all 100 prisoners will succeed.
That's a 終助詞 (shuujoshi) or "sentence-ending particle". Note that despite both being pronounced as "wa", the sentence-ending one is written as わ ("wa"), while the topic-marker particle is written as は ("ha").
In standard Japanese, わ is feminine and mildly emphatic (used for asserting an opinion or stating a fact).
It's the asker saying "you cannot," likely because of decisions he or she has already made about the setting and characters of the story that the green star will be in.
Your response would only make sense if it were an answerer trying to tell the asker what he or she cannot do.
The koan is commonly accompanied by the following:
"What I actually said was, 'If you wire it randomly, it will still have preconceptions of how to play. But you just won't know what those preconceptions are.'" -- Marvin Minsky
I believe he's referring to Strogatz's introductory textbook "Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Engineering".
Thanks for linking, I enjoyed the talk. I'm currently in the middle of the "go back to school for CS" route into software development, and it was heartening to hear your success story. Between starting on CS a few years late and spending too much time on Hacker News, it's easy to feel discouraged at how little I know.
Being able to "check the further destruction of the retina" is a therapeutic benefit when it comes to macular degeneration. It's the best outcome you can hope for on any of our current treatments for it. The retina is still relatively poorly understood, and our treatments for the pathologies of it are unfortunately limited.
I think you're being too dismissive. You may be tired of seeing this kind of post from fresh graduates, but just because the solution to their problems seems obvious to you now, that doesn't change the fact that lots of 18-year-old kids don't know and don't find out until it's too late.
That this happens to so many bright students is a waste of a lot of time, money, and human capital. Having considered it in the years since it happened to me, I think it boils down to a lack of mentorship in our educational system.
I appreciate founders sharing their experiences like this, but I feel like most of this list suffers from premature generalization. Especially if these are lessons learned the hard way, I'd rather hear more of a "war story".
Some, like "They plan details about sh*t that never sees the light of day" are quite self-sufficient, but some of the others are pretty vague or even come across as contradictory. "They seek too much advice from too many sources with too many conflicting views" but also "They do mental incest by bouncing ideas off the same people every time"? I know that different founders make different mistakes, but I'm still in the dark on how to find the happy middle.
For ones like that, or "They have no clue about their market", I want to hear what happened! What's the story behind the advice?
I know that this is beyond the scope of a list like this, but maybe it could be fodder for some future blog posts.
I commend the entrepreneurial traits this man showed, but I don't see how you can simply dismiss the fact that he's profiting from a tragedy-of-the-commons situation. Just because there are some good things about his attitude doesn't mean he can't be criticized.
This story isn't really about the wealth-producing sort of entrepreneurialism that I come to HN for, so I'm not surprised there are negative comments on this post.
My post was not an objection to teaching literary criticism. It was an objection to defending literary criticism by appealing to the value of general critical thinking skills.
If someone proposed to cut computer science from a curriculum, would your defense be "but without computer science, students won't learn how to think critically"?
I also think we're in danger of equivocating over the word "criticism" here. Literary criticism shouldn't be assumed to teach critical thinking well just because the names are similar.