Izzy

[spoiler=Alright, let's try this again. ]Worst case scenarios: For n = 1, it will take a maximum of three flips. n = 2, again I think a maximum of three. I couldn't figure out any combination that would require four flips. Actually, hold up. I think I can do it in two every time. Flip two switches. (Oh, change in light from initial position = "on".) Either one light is on and one is off or two lights are on. Flip down one of the switches you originally switched and flip one of the remaining switches. In the first scenario, there are two possibilities. You have already flipped the blank switch to get to this point. You can either flip the blank switch and a remaining switch (letting you know which one controls the original light because it stayed on, which switch controlled the light that just turned on, and which one is blank, leaving you with the third switch.) Or you flip the non-blank switch and still another switch. So the light that changes for the second time is the switch you've switched twice so far, the other switch is the blank switch, and the switch you switched again in round two controls the light you've seen change this round. In the second scenario, you have two lights on after the initial round of flipping. Flip two more (one of the ones you've already flipped + another). If you get the blank, it's obvious which one is which. If you get the third light, again, obvious, because one of the other lights turned "off". Unless I'm missing something? Then n = 3 for this one. n = 3.. doesn't matter at this point. I don't think. I can do it in three every time. ..So n = 2. Unless I'm wrong about that. In which case.. it doesn't matter.

Welcome back btw! ;D

Well, hint hint I'm not 14. That leaves six for you to guess. Better living through chemistry, bro? Haha.

I'm gonna be honest, I haven't read this thread in a while, but in regards to P4P's drug post: I agree with you aside from nine words haha. My thoughts can pretty much be summed here in a post I wrote May of '09. I haven't reread the entire thread (just my initial post and some others of my own), but my feelings are essentially the same. Aside from the bits about the government. Now I could careless what they do. I want the right to produce my own drugs in my own legal lab and to distribute at will. Purity insured, haha.

State administered standardized tests. Schools have low budgets because of these pointless examinations. Next year, I can possibly be in AP Calculus and Pre-Algebra at the same time because I'm deciding to decline taking a test I could have easily passed in 5th grade? Dude, no. Just no.

1) Izzy twin_bro 2) Crazypainter ??? 3) Slick-confirmed for the second time. 4) BlackCat1313 5) P4P 6) woon 7) tpaxatb 8) Abhisk-confirmed 9) Clozo - confirmination 10) GMaster479 - confirmed 11) Framm 12) Music - here... or am I? 13) Onetruth - confirmed 14) Magic 15) JarZe - confirmed 16) chrispen 17) twoaday 18) LIS - confirmed Backups: 1.twin_bro Sorry, I couldn't foresee current events during the initial sign-ups and confirmed sorta stupidly. School, enough sleep, a social life, AND an online life is wishful thinking. Soz..

^Just opening it up and looking at all the pretty equations will make you mathgasm (legit).

Depending on when this game actually takes off, I might have to drop out. School suuuucks. (Finally time to register for next year's classes though. ;D)

Scaring in a good way, right? Worth mentioning. I bought this book yesterday, along with Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (which is hilarious). Hopefully it'll better my understanding of the subject without scaring me away with the math..

Man, I hate not knowing, but I just don't know. You raise good points. Once again, my view of the universe(s) has been shattered, thanks. ;P Shower time, shall think about this all in depth, and see if I come up with anything. (The cleaning in showering, the exercising in walking/jogging/skating, and the sleeping in sleeping have all become meaningless to me, somehow replaced with thinking-time. Gotta say I love it.) Blehs. Stupid QM turning my brain to mush.

So I grabbed my iTouch and a Monster, decided to go for a walk to mull things over. I came up with God, monsters, energy fluctuations, and entropy. (Haha, can you see the logic in that? God makes me think of monsters, making me think of Monster Energy Drink, making me think of craziness, which = entropy. Anyway, it all makes sense, I swear.) I'm not actually trying to start a(nother) religious debate here. My post (specifically this part) is aimed at Octopuppy, because I know we share similar beliefs, and maybe the analogy will make sense. Basically, the multi-worlds interpretation is the god of quantum mechanics. An answer was needed to explain some extraordinary phenomenon, so solutions were hypothesized, the multi-worlds being among them. Similar to the gods of the early years, current technology didn't provide a meaningful solution, it's all theoretical. This answer made sense, it fit, but ultimately posed more questions than it answers (which isn't necessarily bad). Regardless of experiments, the MW have never been detected, never been formed into a math equation that would ultimately prove them being real, and so forth, the main point being that it's all highly theoretical. Still more likely than God, but.. hardly. I hope you can see why I have to remain skeptical. Just because it nicely answers something it was designed to do, doesn't mean there's any validity to it. A hypothesis that can be just as likely is the idea of a forth-dimensional monster being expressed in our dimension through the accumulation of photons and other microscopic particles. One of the properties of this monster is how it draws photons to itself, and they just happen to stick to it in the way of the interference pattern. Yeah, I know, bull, but no less likely regarding complexity and encountering it with regards to the MW. Now, energy fluctuations. According to our current model, the energy in the universe, able to be neither created nor destroyed, cancels out exactly to zero. Doing any work (such as splitting a universe) requires energy, just the same as this new universe would require energy. Wouldn't we notice either a loss of energy in our own universe or at least some weird fluctuation that is noticeable and measurable, meaning something we can't see has happened? Also, what's the force driving the universes apart? I'm thinking something universal like gravity or electromagnetism, but like these two and the strong and weak forces, other particles would have to be found explaining it, and so far, as far as I know, none have even been theorized. Finally, entropy. The universe(s) get more orderly as time goes on, but a huge sense of untidiness had to exist way back when. So "mess ups" would have to be fairly common (eh, maybe not), getting less common as time goes on. So, I dunno, this point sucks, it made sense when I was walking. But the universe isn't really, even now "tidy" in any sense, so I don't see where the necessary tidiness comes in. Meh. Anyway. Yeah. Homework time.

Also, think of how fecking complex that would be. I don't think you get to claim Occam's Razor.

Man I seriously need to uncover that post. Or become a physicist, meh. Chances are, I'm entirely wrong. I'm just going to point out now that my arguments are baseless, formed from reasoning that to me just makes sense to me. If I'm wrong, I'm sorry. I don't claim to know the answers, so.. consider this a form of devil's advocacy? Anyway. I'm sort of iffy on your post. This is how I'm understanding it: The interference pattern arises from a probabilistic shape (that looks like this), where each individual photon shot has a certain chance of landing on any one of those spots. The more photons shot, the clearer the pattern is. Okay, good so far. Then you lose me. The way I've always understood the multiple worlds is like this: When a quantum system is faced with a choice of alternatives such as a particle going through one of two or more slits, then rather than the wave function entering a superposition, everything sort of splits into a number of realities that are equal to the number of options available, all identical apart to the option chosen by the particle. But then the universes overlap (only where the interference is taking place), until decoherence (giving the appearance of wave function collapse) sets in, separating them into non-interacting independent realities. We also split, only ever seeing one reality. But there are some unanswered questions with this. Why does the interference pattern collapse when we're observing which slit the photon goes through? It should just tell us both, continue splitting, and create the pattern instead of no pattern. Or tell us which slit it went through in our universe, but still continue the interference pattern. There's no reason observing should mess it up, according to this theory. If the atom is able to sense the presence of itself in these multiple realities (supposedly the reason it keeps choosing elsewhere), why can't we? The whole zillions of zillions of universes being produced per zillionth of a second doesn't make sense to me. Umm. Man, long post, not that much going for me. Meh. So I'm thinking it's something else. I know I'm not really disproving it, and am not really suggesting anything else, but it just.. doesn't seem right.

Then it doesn't answer the dual-slit trick, the reason it was created in the first place.

How to make money whilst on vacation? Particularly useful if you're spending the summer backpacking through a foreign country on a college-student salary. Oh, worth mentioning. I know a dude who wrote his EE, his information and everything was entirely original, but his thesis was plagiarize. Honor code followed and he didn't get his degree because the EE is the largest component of it. Make sure to reword if you're using anything you find online, turnitin.com is a dog.

Brooo, Copenhagen interpretation = the worst. The same "interpretation" can be applied to essentially anything, thereby rendering EVERYTHING as unknowable. I'm really not understanding why anyone takes it seriously. Though, that's clever. I never made the connection between it and Schrodinger's cat before.

Rigorous high school program. It's like AP classes, except makes up all your classes, is harder, and more work. Internationally recognized, though. Supposedly worth it? Makes uni look like primary school by comparison. http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/International_Baccalaureate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Baccalaureate

Tempted to go rent it again.. I have the basic gist of it, but there's a lot I don't remember.

My superior knowledge of all that is human allows me to predict that Chrispen's response in this thread after watching this movie will be something along the lines of " "

Meh, couldn't find the post I was looking for, but was thinking about this on the bus this morning. What I'm about to say doesn't disprove it in any sense, but makes the entire theory sound devilishly improbably. In the multi-verse, a new universe doesn't spring into creation with every human movement, it's with the movement of EVERY atom, every proton, neutron, and electron, every quark, every photon, each particle that possibly make up those mentioned that we don't yet know about. Now, any one of those have an almost infinite possible directions in which they can travel and at which speeds. So, just for one photon, in an amount of time so minuscule that as humans we can't even comprehend it, zillions of new universes form for the "choices" made by this individual photon. Multiply that by every particle in this universe, and those universes are created. Then realize this is going on in EVERY universe at the same time. From this, we can see more universes are in existence than any number we can comprehend. A number so large it would take a computer decades to write the scientific notation of it. It's like, you really think we wouldn't have noticed one of those by now? That something wouldn't go wrong in *one* of them, giving us the ability to observe them?

The multi-verse theory used to be my favorite explanation for the dual slit trick seeing as it's pretty much the only one that actually makes sense. ..Until this one guy made it look like total bull. Need to get offline for a bit (>_>), but I'll look into the criticisms of it later and see if I can find the post. Blew my mind, but was over a year ago and I'm having trouble remembering the exact details.

I rented it from Blockbuster maybe two years ago. That movie was.. so.. I can't explain it. I watched it four times before returning it, and I still could hardly figure out what was going on. Don't watch it, your head will explode.

Alright, a few things. My quantum knowledge is lacking, so I can't get very elaborate, but here's my basic understanding of this. Firstly, I'll echo the views from. Bro, it is seriously arrogant to even for one second assume that everything that happens (or anything, really) not from direct human intervention happened for us. As far as we are able to tell, the universe is not some conscious entity bending its powers for the benefit of humanity. ... The universe is just an enormous container for everything that exists (as far as we know), and it doesn't even know about it. The physical laws that govern its behavior don't change just because life came into existence, they were set at the beginning of the universe due to random constants that just happened to be the way they were at the time of "creation". "Gmoz, lifeforms!" is entirely meaningless to the universe because it's not an entity that is capable of perceiving them the life it homes. Now, the QM bit. Tbh, it's just an underdeveloped field where pretty much no one knows wtf is going on. Atm, just a bunch of particles behavior crazily. However, from my understanding, an observer in the quantum sense does not need to be a conscious one. A single electron in the presence of another electron (or smaller, you get the idea) is enough to get things rolling. If EVERYTHING vanished, the cloud of possibilities goes back to a pre-Big Bang state, and stays as such until another Big Bang (or something different and entirely unimaginable) happens. With the creation of every new particle, the possibilities grow. It's like, if I close my eyes and don't touch/listen to/smell/eat/observe in any way my laptop, does it disappear? ...Probably not. *edit* Just thinking. It might not even have to be two different particles because particles are able to observe themselves? Trying to remember something I read ages ago. =/