kingofpain

Nope I am not applying Aristotelian logic since I think you are not being honest (you're kidding me!) when you say all your cows are purple. "All my cows are purple" implies that you own more than one purple cow. You cannot apply logic until you reduce the sentence to have an unambiguous meaning. That meaning comes from the English language. My semantic interpretation of the sentence leads me to believe that there are 3 items involved when you use the phrase "All but two of ....". It has nothing to do with the school of logic I follow. Here are the two possible mathematical representations of the sentence: The statement "All but two of my cars are Fords" can either mean The cars in the set U - A are all Fords where the cardinality of A is 2 OR it can mean The cars in the set U - A are all Fords where the cardinality of A is 2 and the cardinality of U is >= 3 The meaning of the original sentence is likely to be interpreted fairly uniformly amongst speakers of English as meaning the second due to the implicit connotations of the wording of the sentence. This is a purely semantic phenomenon and has nothing to do with the school of logic involved. Cheers! -- Vig

This should go a long way in resolving this discussion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_logic...f_Boolean_terms And I would like to reference a favourite response of mine to questions like these: http://xkcd.com/169/ Cheers! -- Vig

Google for "Schrodinger" and "cat" Cheers! -- Vig

Bonanova: Two plus two equals five and you cannot use the laws of arithmetic. Vig: Yeah, right! On a broader level, I think the question has to communicate clearly the meaning of the statement. Logic does not begin to play a part until the statements are unambiguous. The duty of resolving vagueness and ambiguity lies with the tool of communication (English) and not the tool of reasoning (Logic). Think about the following situation: Assume that I am a witness in court and that I own no houses. If I say "All my houses are in Texas", would I be perjuring myself? In any reasonable court, I would assume so. In social circumstances, people would assume that I do own at least one house in Texas. In fact, most people would not even consider the sentence to be ambiguous in terms of illuminating them as to whether I owned a house or not. The question of school of logic may be relevant in a mathematical/logical analysis of the sentence. But even then, the parsing of the sentence would be done with the information gleaned from the meaning of 'All' in this context which comes back to English rather than set theory. So the OP is correct in saying that it is an English issue and not a Logic issue. P.S. You are also assuming a meaning for All in Boolean logic to imply inclusion of the null set. One could argue that even in Boolean logic, it includes sets with a cardinality of at least one. I am also having a hard time accepting the following First off, based on the assumed equivalence of the negation and the assertion, I think we can assume that the following is true. "All males are not not male" If "All four-legged humans with three brains and two left hands are male" is true, "All four-legged humans with three brains and two left hands are NOT male" is equally true. These three sentences together produce a contradiction

Here is a puzzling contradiction that I conclude from your answer. "If all but two of your cars are Fords and you have but two cars then there aren't any cars but those two neither of which are Fords" For the record, I think 3 is the correct answer due to the implicit assumption that in order for a number of cars to be Fords, that number has to be a natural number. Of course, I am assuming the question meant "What is the fewest number of cars I could have?". If not, the answer is 17 Cheers! -- Vig

Soeey peeps! I got a little too much stuff going on around the end of the semester. I really appreciate unreality and others keeping me in mind while making up the roster, but I am sadly going to have to pass on Mafia V. I enjoyed following IV and you'll see me lurking on Mafia V too! Cheers! -- Vig

Question goes to Lonahte... Subtract ohh and I give a not old solid...

If the answer indeed is 25, then this is appropriate: Cheers! -- Vig

Edit: I feel like such a tool for ending my lines in a semi colon after a Saturday evening coding session!

Actually, the old man is not very bright and neither is the applauding crowd and the young man is least intelligent. I would have started rattling off a list of things we have developed for the next generation. The Internet, Space tourism, Mars exploration, hybrid cars, and heavens knows what more we are on track to develop. This is, of course, in addition to not engaging in a World War where cities were obliterated by nuclear weapons (although we do have problems of our generation). No disrespect intended for my previous generations though, we couldn't have done all this without their progresses just like they couldn't have done what they did without their predecessors. I just find that the old man's 'comeback' or 'clever reply' was fairly ignorant and shame on the young man who couldn't call him out. I also believe very firmly that age does not automatically garner respect. You have to earn my respect whether you are 5 or 95. I do understand that age brings wisdom, but how much wisdom it brought a particular individual is up for questioning. I've known pre-teens that are intellectually and emotionally more mature than retired individuals Cheers! -- Vig

Juggernaut actually has origins from the name of a hindu deity called Jagannath. An idol of this deity is carried on pilgrimage by thousands of followers and becomes an unstoppable force which 'juggernaut' came to mean. Ironic then that one of the villains in the X-Men comics was called Juggernaut

I first derived it when I first did algebra at home in 5th or 6th grade. And then I've been using it at least once a week since I am actually starting to think that it might be difficult to come up with questions for the Math camp that eliminate factors like knowledge and experience. Cheers! -- Vig

I'll probably get lynched for saying this, but you haven't missed much. In my opinion, Lagaan was just a feel-good sports movie that basically pushed every button Indians had like cricket, imperialism, freedom, female emancipation and all of this Bollywood "ishtyle". I would call it the Indian equivalent of "Remember the Titans" Really good movies (again, IMO) from our neck of the woods include Astitva, Manichithrathazhu and Nizhalkutthu... The first is an excellent social commentary/drama and the second is the best psycho-thriller I have seen. The last is a critically acclaimed movie about the death penalty from a very eye=opening perspective and is the best of the lot. And yeah... 5 more signups shouldn't take long... We just need to avoid players who cannot commit to the game... And on that note, sagekid is showing some passive aggressive behaviour elsewhere on Brainden towards you and I find that amusingly childlike... Cheers! -- Vig

That's me alright!

That surely depends on the question. I daresay there are questions you can solve faster

We need to do one of 2 things. a) Limit ourselves to math puzzles which do not require formal math education. b) Eliminate people who HAVE math education (like me) and have them frame questions instead. Otherwise, a question like "Prove the Korselt criterion" would take me 5 minutes and a high schooler much longer simply because of the knowledge required (as opposed to pure mathematical skills) Cheers! -- Vig

I would like to take part (this experiment slipped through my radar!) and replace SK so that Nayana can play too Cheers! -- Vig

Cheers!

1) Frost 2) Brandonb 3) Kingofpain 4) Pw0nzd 5) Cherry Lane 6) Dawh 7) Nayana 8) Dnae 9) Scott 10) GC 11) Puzzlegirl 12) Slick 13) Pieman 14) 15) 16) 17) 18) 19) 20)

Cheers! -- Vig

15? Algebra is not hard! And I personally feel these questions are a tad too easy for the people playing. Cheers! -- Vig

If that equation is to be assumed, k = 0 I can also come up with answers like 12.5 and 9 if not. Q is a bit vague Cheers! -- Vig

My first instinct says this... Not based on any real prob. theory

It is an expression, not an equation. What do I win? Cheers! -- Vig