unreality

Aren't pangrams supposed to be each letter of the alphabet ONCE?

nice riddle ploper ;D right now I'm thinking of putting this concept to even eviler riddle-usage, so watch out

To clarify: by "AS CLOSE AS POSSIBLE" I mean where each person is as close as possible to 0.2 chances of winning. If you want to get specific, where the total (absolute value) deviation of each person's chances from 0.2 is as close as possible to 0

No takers?

You played Three Games of Zarball and had to win two in a row... you made the right choices (but unfortunately lost). Your second chance for freedom came with the Five Games of Zarball, in which you had to win at least one of three combinations. Again, you lost in a mistake up against the King. However you won your freedom, and deserved it, in the intense Royal Zarball Tournament, where you made your way to victory. Now you have taken the King's offer as the Supreme Dignifiably Appointed Royal Zarball Trainer of Excellence. and figured out the probability of hats being returned to the proper heads in The Royal Zarball Spectators crisis. You are still the Supreme Dignifiably Appointed Royal Zarball Trainer of Excellence, and so the 1-on-1 game of speed, skill, strength and stamina is your job... now you are helping arrange the Village Zarball Tournament- but so many people want to play in the tournament, and with each new player, it's less and less likely you are going to have a perfect power of two number of players. So you cannot have a perfectly even tournament, so you've set up a system of byes. There will be tryouts in which a villager's basic skill at the game is determined and seeded, so that the tournament can be arranged fairly, and the players that have more skill than the others in their round are given a "bye" to the next round- in other words, they get to skip this round without playing anybody. (1 - Warmup Problem) 179 villagers showed up for the zarball tournament... what is the least number of total matches needed to find 1 winner? Hint: there is an easy way to solve this and a harder way... the riddle is finding the easy way, though the hard way works too ;D Don't post solutions to problem #1 in your post, as the answers are right here, just check your answers ;D unless you have a totally different solution of course, or want to discuss the answers. Now onto a harder problem: (2) The way that the tournament worked, with "byes" based on skill (not always bying only 1 person if there was an odd number, sometimes 3, sometimes 5), it ended up with a Final Five. Your friend, Perry, is in the Final Five, and these are the Final Five and Perry's chances of beating each of them: Perry Sanders 1/2 Dave 3/4 Xavier 1/3 Ella 7/8 Assume that chances of beating someone are relative and stand when other people are facing each other. For example, Perry has a 3/4 chance to beat Dave and a 1/3 chance to beat Xavier. Thus Xavier is twice as good as Perry (1/3 = 1:2) and Perry is three times as good as Dave (3/4 = 3:1) so Xavier is 6 times better than Dave, thus Xavier has a 6:1 or 6/7 chance to beat Dave. Remember, you are the Supreme Dignifiably Appointed Royal Zarball Trainer of Excellence, so it's up to you to set up the system of byes and brackets and such. Each round you may have to end up rearranging the entire brackets to suit the tournament right. So, anyway, it's down to these 5 people. You can arrange it any way you like using brackets and byes. How can you make it fair so that each person has an equal likelihood OR AS CLOSE AS POSSIBLE to winning? (3) Problem 3 is like Problem 2 in every way except the objective. Now you want to arrange the brackets to give your friend Perry the highest possible chance of winning. In this problem, there can only be two byes (for example: 5, bye 1, 4/2=2, +1 = 3, bye 1, 2/2=1, +1 = 2, 2/2 = 1 winner) and the same person cannot be byed twice.

good play on words

For people that say -1 is not prime, they are wrong as far as I know. -1 is only divisible by itself and 1 (-1*1 and 1*-1 are its only two factor pairs) therefore -1 is prime but I'm not sure if Primes are allowed to be negative, but even if they are, you can't have a negative age ;D if primes were allowed to be negative, -1 would be the only prime. Take -2 for example: (-2, 1) (1, -2) (2, -1) (-1, 2) a prime number only has 2 factor pairs (itself and 1, 1 and itself), but -2 has four cuz its negative. -3 is the same. etc. So if negative primes were allowed (not sure if they are), -1 would be the only negative prime. Just thought I'd point that out

yeah keep up the good puzzles... the harder the better ;D and yeah I'm like Ploper, if there's a spoiler answer I'm just gonna look at it and not bother to try unless the puzzle really caught my eye

For the south pole solution: Let's say there's a latitude (a circle around the earth running east-west) that's exactly 1 mile in circumference. In other words, a point shortly north of the south pole that is 1 mile around the earth. If you start on any of the infinite points that are 1 mile north of that special latitude, then you can go 1 mile south and then 1 mile west to go all the way around the earth, then 1 mile north to be back where you started ;D

maybe I exaggerated a little bit third grade

yeah lol. YOPY = Your Own Personal YOPY I like that one ;D

yeah lol I could do this in 2nd grade without blinking (except I might've needed a calculator for 576*6)

A good idea though ;D hear hear! hear hear! basically I agree with what you said yes 'good and evil' are Lord of the Rings-style works of fiction. There is no such things as good and evil. People are far too complex to be labeled by 'good' or 'evil' or even any shade of grey in between. The world is full of colors and we are vibrant mixes of all of them- some of various colors, some darker shades, some lighter shades, but all a big mix that changes with every second of your life. Like a slowly moving painting, or fastly moving, depending on how much you think individual thoughts continually affect your being. Probably a lot. I would say a painting changing at medium-speed lol. You know what I mean. But not a painting of something that looks like something- no seemingly apparent purpose, but a great, complicated splash of colors. That's what I would say if someone told me people were 'black and white' (I probably wouldn't say all that, but ya know ;D) Even single actions cannot be labeled as good and evil. They affect things in many different ways from different viewpoints. They follow the laws of heat conservation. etc. etc. There is no underlying axis of good and evil. There are, however, socially and legally accepted behaviors and concepts among groups. And it seems those accepted concepts are diminishing in places of the world previously discussed here, such as Africa. And I agree something should be done. But what? What power do we have to do anything? this is just a discussion, but we can certainly be a think tank as to where certain strategies would lead. And I think general consensus, Lost_in_space, is that the CODE idea wouldn't work. But don't give up hope ;D we should move on and consider the effects of other strategies instead of what you were doing (sulking and saying we didn't work fast enough to come to conclusions- we did come to conclusions, they just weren't ones you wanted to hear. That doesn't mean our decision making process is flawed, though it's of course a possibility ) anyway, the cloning point was interesting, though i dont think I totally understood your post, jword. Are you saying it would be a good thing for everyone to have the same outlook? I would say that's the worst possible thing that could ever happen to the human race, if everyone had the same outlook

Nah I just made that up lol

What about the people that go to Hell? That's the "stick" part in my "carrot and stick" analogy. I have a few things to say about Hell: 1) what can you possibly do on Earth that deserves you INFINITE suffering? 2) the "life would get stale" arguement works for Hell too. Eventually it wouldn't be much suffering anymore after thousands of years of the same repeated punishment. You would probably actually grow to LIKE said punishment. Only if they could find an INFINITE number of DIFFERENT ENOUGH punishments, mental and physical, would you be able to continually punish the subjects...but that sounds so cruel and pointless to me. What's the point? Subjecting someone to repeated pain will make them more bitter, not less so. Think of it this way: a teacher sends you to detention for being disruptive in class. She makes you write out, 100 times, "I will not be a disruptive moron" while another teacher is continually slapping your head with a crowbar (lol). Will this make you more acceptive and happy and willing to embrace the teacher (God)? No, it won't. It will make you even more bitter. What if you had to write that out 1000 times? A million times? AN INFINITE AMOUNT OF TIMES???

They're both 1 lbs ;D this is probably the oldest one in the book, close to "where did they bury the survivors?"

toddpeak: All good theories... if you're always right. But you're not. Nobody is. So what happens when you're wrong? Your entire post hinges on your assumption that (direct quote), "If I weren't correct, I wouldn't think the way I do." That's a flawed assumption. You're basically saying that you're always right. Which is not only wrong, it's selfish. You're not the center of the universe. Get over your ego, there are many "intelligent people" (as you put it) studying certain areas and thus know a great deal more than you. It's stupid to assume that you're always right... in other words, if you know you're always right then you're wrong. (paradox? No, cuz it's true) And going back to the definition of close-mindedness, are you really going to push away other people's opinions? When someone invents something new, do you say "I didn't invent that, so it's a piece of garbage." No, I doubt that you do. Get a grip. Don't take this the wrong way... I know the words are coming out harsh, but I'm not trying to insult you. It's good to be open-minded because you're open to possibilities. We live in an ever changing world and if you refuse to adapt to it you're going to fall behind. No offense.

octopuppy: basically what I would've said is what you said you beat me to it ;D

go Flying Spaghetti Monster addressng SpelChexRool: you say the world seems "futile and cynical and meaningless" without an afterlife. I digress to this completely. With such a short (relatively) lifetime, it makes the experiences we have in life more meaningful. What's the point of having an infinite afterlife? BORING! As I said earlier in this debate, atheists (at least I) truly appreciate the beauty of our archaic universe. I'm not saying theists don't, I'm sure they do, but many theists have this idea that an atheistic world (ie, the world we live in), is empty and bleak and purposeless and bla bla bla. It's just the opposite. Just had to say that, it's another theistic dilusion about atheism (spread awareness! lol)

Angels and devils are a byproduct of religious belief, so no. They are just as ludicrous (sorry if that's insulting) as God or Allah or Zeus or whatever (not sure what religion you are) I (and most atheists, I presume) do not believe in gods, demigods, devils, angels, archangels, demons, saints, prophets, etc. And I don't believe in any ghosts or superstitions or luck or unluck or anything like that either, though sometimes do things cuz it's in my culture or repetition or whatever (knocking on wood, etc. lol) Another interesting point, is that I say things like "oh my god" or "what the hell", etc. Though I don't believe in God or Hell. I'd be interested to see if other atheists do the same actually I got some evidence from this very topic lol hehe Another point I'd like to bring up, that I haven't seen before on this topic, is "the afterlife". Obviously I don't believe in afterlife. We die and then we die. Our souls die with our minds which die with our body. The system that runs our cells just shuts down. Since our intelligence and consciousness is a byproduct of our brain and nervous system, we don't "go anywhere", because clearly our brain does not get up and move somewhere after death. I understand that theists believe that our soul (my word for consciousness) is separate from our physical brain, but I don't think so. Though it stinks that the point is never hit home to a religious person. If they're right (doubtful) than they go to heaven or hell or whatever, but if they're wrong (which is what I'm talking about here), they'll never know they were wrong. They're dead. Anyway, heaven and hell are the "carrot and the stick". If you do what the religion and the diety wants you to, you go to heaven. If you break their rules you go to hell. Kinda restricts life for ya, doesn't it? Plus surely nobody deserves to "suffer for eternity" in hell. What crime as a human permits infinite suffering?

Does "Da" mean Yes and "Ja" mean No? Or does "Da" mean No and "Ja" mean Yes? Or is it unknown which of those two cases it is?

How bout we drop the whole "belief" thing. I'm sick of watching Scraff insult Duh Puck, whose just trying to understand, and then because Scraff insults him, Duh Puck retaliates back trying to prove a tiny insignificant point about the definition of the word "belief". Duh Puck, sorry man, but it's not up to you what atheists believe or think. We are the ones who decide for ourselves. When we say "we don't believe in a God", we mean exactly that. End of story. So please, please, PLEASE drop this "meaning of the word 'belief'" arguement, it's annoying as hell. How bout we get onto points that actually matter (like the watchmaker analogy)

ugh I had a huge post and I accidently quit the program! Basically the top part of it was apologizing to Duh Puck about Scraff's harshness in his most recent post. He's just trying to get a point across- we all are. And the rest was agreeing with Octopuppy and building on what he was saying, and talking about collective intelligence and soul and stuff, but yeah. Maybe I'll find a nice link to post that says what I was saying or something, cuz I don't feel like retyping it, lol

There are two eggs that hatched right after one of the birds got killed. 2 birds -> 1 bird -> 3 birds