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Cake day: May 31st, 2023

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  • It’s gonna get much worse when you start to try mapping days of the week onto the new times. Are days gonna be the same everywhere as well, to stay from 0 to 24? If so, have fun saying things like “Let’s find a time on Wednesday/Thursday”. People likely couldn’t be bothered and would probably just use the day that their normal wake-up time falls on to mean the full solar day instead. At which point you could also just say okay, weekdays are still following local solar days. But now what weekday is it halfway around the world? Now you need to look up their solar day.

    All this to say - abolishing time zones will introduce the reverse problem for every problem that it seemingly solves. You can’t change the fact that our planet rotates and people in different locations will follow different schedules. Turning the lookup-table upside down is just a cosmetic change that doesn’t remove the situation that’s causing the confusion. I’d rather just stick with the set of problems that we’re already used to dealing with.






  • From the article:

    For many years, we’ve had software that can generate lists of valid conclusions that can be drawn from a set of starting assumptions. Simple geometry problems can be solved by “brute force”: mechanically listing every possible fact that can be inferred from the given assumption, then listing every possible inference from those facts, and so on until you reach the desired conclusion.

    But this kind of brute-force search isn’t feasible for an IMO-level geometry problem because the search space is too large. Not only do harder problems require longer proofs, but sophisticated proofs often require the introduction of new elements to the initial figure—as with point D in the above proof. Once you allow for these kinds of “auxiliary points,” the space of possible proofs explodes and brute-force methods become impractical.

    So, mathematicians must develop an intuition about which proof steps will likely lead to a successful result. DeepMind’s breakthrough was to use a language model to provide the same kind of intuitive guidance to an automated search process.