To cheer you up in difficult times 32, Annika Heckel’s guest post: How does...
This is a guest post kindly written by Annika Heckel. We first reported about Annika Heckel’s breakthrough in this post. A pdf version of this post can be found here. Pick an -vertex graph uniformly...
View ArticleFace to face talks and recorded videotaped introductions
Many face to face activities are now resuming. Last week I took part in a great conference on high dimensional expanders at the Simons Foundation, I recently gave real life talks with large audiences...
View ArticleAmazing: Jinyoung Park and Huy Tuan Pham settled the expectation threshold...
A brief summary: In the paper, A proof of the Kahn-Kalai conjecture, Jinyoung Park and Huy Tuan Pham proved the 2006 expectation threshold conjecture posed by Jeff Kahn and me. The proof is wonderful....
View ArticleICM 2022 awarding ceremonies (1)
Hugo Duminil-Copin, June Huh, James Maynard and Maryna Viazovska were awarded the Fields Medal 2022 and Mark Braverman was awarded the Abacus Medal 2022. I am writing from Helsinki where I attended...
View ArticleTest Your Intuition 50. Two-Player Random Walk; Can You Detect Who Did Not...
Ruth and Ron start together at the origin and take a walk on the integers. Every day they make a move. They take turns in flipping a coin and they move together right or left according to the outcome....
View ArticleAnswer to Test Your Intuition 50: Detecting a Deviator
Two weeks ago we asked: Ruth and Ron start together at the origin and take a walk on the integers. Every day they make a move. They take turns in flipping a coin and they move together right or left...
View ArticleTest Your intuition 51
Suppose that and are two compact convex sets in space. Suppose that contains . Now consider two quantities is the average volume of a simplex forms by four points in drawn uniformly at random. is the...
View ArticleBo’az Klartag and Joseph Lehec: The Slice Conjecture Up to Polylogarithmic...
Bo’az Klartag (right) and Joseph Lehec (left) In December 2020, we reported on Yuansi Chen breakthrough result on Bourgain’s alicing problem and the Kannan Lovasz Simonovits conjecture. It is a...
View ArticleChatGPT Meets Elchanan Mossel’s Dice Problem
One of the greatest hits of this blog was Elchanan Mossel’s dice problem, asked here and answered here. Here is how chatGPT (the free version) handles the problem. You throw a die until you get 6. What...
View ArticleTYI 54: A Variant of Elchanan Mossel’s Amazing Dice Paradox
The following question was inspired by recent comments to the post on Elchanan Mossel’s amazing Dice Paradox. A fair dice is a dice that when thrown you get each of the six possibilities with...
View ArticleTest Your Intuition 55: The Case of Two Screening Tests
Here is a great question invented by Michele Piccione and Ariel Rubinstein. (Let me use this opportunity to recommend their mind boggling 1997 paper on the absent-minded driver.) The question (TYI 55)...
View ArticleTest Your Intuition 56: Fifteen Boxes Puzzle
Andrew and Barbara are playing a game. Fifteen boxes are arranged in a 3-by-5 grid, labeled with the letters A through O, as shown below. A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O The organizers of the game have...
View ArticleTimothy Chow’s Amazing Fifteen Boxes Puzzle (TYI 56)
TYI56 asked the following question of Timothy Chow: You have fifteen boxes labelled with the English letters from A to O. Two identical prizes are placed in two (distinct) boxes chosen at random....
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