Specifically it is the frequency-based keyboard layout of traditional hot-metal Linotype machines. If you made a typo, the custom was to fill up the spoiled slug by running your finger down the etaoin shrdlu rows, and start fresh on the next slug. On rare occasions the layout clerk would accidentally let a shrdlu slug go to press, to the amusement of the readership.
Telegraph operators ranked the letters as etaonrish.
Wordle is inspired by Mastermind, sure, but I don’t think it’s fair to call it a copy. I enjoy Mastermind; I do not enjoy Wordle¹.
Even the simplest details are different, like e.g. in Wordle you know which letters are in the right or wrong places but in Mastermind you only know some are but not which.
¹ And because this is HN, I have to point out that that is just a personal preference, it does not in any way reflect on you, the reader. You are free to enjoy or dislike whatever you want.
not shameless as here is cut and paste from the landing page when all that renders is plain text
elect.horse is a daily gerrymandering puzzle: the horse is losing the popular vote to the cow, the donkey and the goat, and you draw equal districts on a hex map so it wins the most seats anyway. It needs JavaScript to play.
I only clicked because I have a horse, with whom I spent a few miniuts out in the paddock before daylight listening to the coyotes whoop it up so close you could smell
there not dog , but not bad, odor.
You can get a feel of the state of the software industry through the replies to this comment. Specifically, the countless times people counter with "Oh, well everything is a copy of everything", citing some X that's just like Y. Except X is merely inspired by Y and in reality has far more original ideas that make it completely different. In this case this is a literal carbon copy, and people are automatically rushing to defend it. When the 'vibecoders copying indie games 1-for-1 and reselling them on Steam' debacle happened, these people probably wanted to congratulate the ripoff makers for their good business sense and brilliant use of AI.
Yeah, when I saw elect.horse I didn't think "Ooh, a new game I've never imagined before". This is a problem, but you can show the problem as part of a fun game. Like Monopoly the point isn't that this is an awesome game, the point is that it's a real problem, but if you have fun that's great too. If you get somewhat good at the game, you can understand the problem better.
The hex grid (rather than, say, square, or random Voronoi regions). The fact that some hexes have 1 voter and some have zero (rather than, say, all hexes having 1 voter, or any having more than 1). The circular colored dot indicating the voter's party (rather than, say, a picture of a horse, or tinting the entire hex). The "Hint", "Reset", and "Submit"/"Call election" buttons below the grid, in that specific order; and (I assume) the nature of the hints. The "health bar" graphic depicting the number of horse voters and donkey voters.
Now that I find a more compelling argument than "Hey you used hexes". It might still turn out to be a similar "obvious" choice but unlike the hexes it's not the first idea that comes to mind.
Every creative work is a copy of a copy; that’s just culture. The commons of ideas is a collective work, until someone pulls them out of the air, reworks them into something “original”, and plops them onto a page.
Ulysses is a copy of the Odyssey, Minecraft was a copy of Infiniminer, Stardew Valley copied Harvest Moon, Fortnite copied PUBG, film directors copy and spread each others’ techniques and storylines all the time. George Lucas even admits that Star Wars was heavily based on Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, while Kurosawa’s film was derived from historical plays and John Ford’s westerns.
I wasn't there for Stardew, but Fortnite definitely does not start out copying PUBG, the transformation is arguably more damning - Fortnite was a different and much less interesting game (now "Save The World" mode), and it got the "Battle Royale" mode everybody knows about today because PUBG popularized this idea of "battle royale" shooters and Epic could see how to do that with their existing IP very quickly and clean up.
Really? So I can ditch Minefraft for Infiniminer and get an identical experience? Same mechanics, items, bosses, worlds, achievements, structures and all?
Or are you perhaps using a game that was merely inspired by another concept but expanded on it in brand new ways to defend a game that is literally identical to what it's copying?
Dr. Heilbronner's family hailed from Heilbronn, of course, but they defected to the U.S. and dropped the "Heil" when the Bellamy Salute went out of style.
If you want to make a PR to put in a new submission, feel free to do so. There's no particular reason why the site currently stops at 35-36 points, other than computational limits.
> This problem is related to a more general family of incidence geometry problems called 'lower bounds for incidences': given some collection of geometric objects (say, points and lines), under what conditions can we guarantee that there are in fact more 'almost incidences' than we originally expect?
I wonder if there are some other related problems for small-n cases that I could add somewhere on this website?
1. One can ask the same problem but for k-gons instead of triangles.
2. Given a set of point-line pairs (x1, l1), ..., (xn, ln) [[that is, each xj lies in the line lj]], consider the smallest distance between some xi and lj where i != j. Then as in Heilbronn's problem we want configurations so that this smallest distance is as large as possible.
In 2 here we already see a key feature of 'incidence lower bounds' problems: we need to assume some initial 'trivial incidences' for the problem to make sense at all. If we didn't require them; we could put all the points at the top, and the lines at the bottom, and call it a day! The 'trivial incidences' force the points and lines to be spatially mixed; then we want to find a 'non-trivial incidence'.
Asymptotics for problem 1 are very open (seems decently harder than Heilbronn) but problem 2 was recently solved by Cosmin [1]
Actually, information about (2) immediately gives you something about the Heilbronn problem: take your n points, and use them to define n/2 lines. This gives a family of n/2 points and n/2 lines (forgetting about the 'other' point on each line). Apply the best answer you get to (2), to find a point of distance r to some line. Since that line originally came from two other points, you get a triangle of area ~ r. This is where the best known asymptotics for Heilbronn's problem come from.
I made this website to showcase the Heilbronn problem, which is a classic problem in optimization. Lately there has been a wave of contributions of new records made by amateur mathematicians - you could be one of them!
Location: Munich, Germany
Remote: Open to it. Authorized to work in USA, Germany, UK, and Ireland.
Willing to relocate: No; occasional travel is ok though
Technologies: Python, Java, Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP
Résumé/CV: https://tejstead.com/resume
Email: chatgptej+hn [at] gmail.com
Experienced backend software engineer / platform engineer / SRE with an interest in reliability and cybersecurity. Ex-AWS ; QuantCo
> I am at a loss about what to do with these results.
I would recommend publishing them to Palomar (https://palomar-registry.org/) - I have no affiliation, this is an online registry of Lean-verified proofs created by Terrence Tao.
I have submitted a proof there that's also minorly important in an extremely niche field.
Anyway, I feel like it's a good place to dump AI slop lean proofs because the main point of the registry is that it verifies that: 1) your Lean challenge statement is the same as what you informally state you're trying to prove; 2) your Lean proof actually compiles.
This could be useful to future AI slop researchers who want to know if a given result has already been formalized, and they may be able to mine some lemmas from your work. Also, it's good to know for the field in general what has been proven.
I'm fairly certain you can set your publishing name to be whatever you want, so you could set it to be just the word "Anonymous", or the name of the model you used.
reply