The World's Greatest Riddle

[igotrhythm]

Re: The World's Greatest Riddle

Holy ****...I thought the puzzle was impossible. Where the hell did you hear about the solution involving the torus?

[MrRubix]

Re: The World's Greatest Riddle

You can actually deduce the problem's impossible two-dimensionally via certain properties of graphs and Cartesian planes I'm too lazy to get into. There are other really cool shapes besides toruses (torii?) such as a mobius strip, or even a hypersphere or tesseract >:]

[foilman8805]

Re: The World's Greatest Riddle

Can't really do the hypersphere since it's a dimension above ours...though maybe you could attempt to draw it?

4D on 2D probably would suck.

[igotrhythm]

Re: The World's Greatest Riddle

I haven't done Calc 3 yet, easy.

[MrRubix]

Re: The World's Greatest Riddle

Well I mean we don't really "see" things in 4d, so the best you can really do is map a sort of cross-section into a lower dimension (such as cutting a sphere into 2d circles, or a 2d circle into a 1d line). So if a sphere, for instance, is made up of a collection of 2d circles (calculus can tell us this easily -- for instance, you can find the volume of a sphere by taking collective areas of infinitesimally thin 2d circles across the diameter of a sphere using some nifty integrals), then a hypersphere is made up of a collection of spheres.

[bluguerrilla]

Re: The World's Greatest Riddle

Example: Fold it up and you get a hypercube.

[foilman8805]

Re: The World's Greatest Riddle

So you would need to cut up a sphere into infinitesimally small cross-sections (which would be spheres), and then integrate over each 3D cut. It would be far from easy to do a Reimann sum on 3D circles, so you'd have to do like you said and cut the sphere into infinitesimally small 2D circles.

I don't want to envision the calculus involved with that (though, I may be able to do it). Like you said, at best, all we can do is map the cross-sections, and for most of us, mapping in 3D is fairly unreasonable because so few of us have the technology readily available, so you'd have to drop down into 2D. That's all I was saying, and you echoed that.

[bluguerrilla]

Re: The World's Greatest Riddle

Although it sounds hard it's really just hard to envision and easy as hell to do.

I mean, the equation for a hypersphere is still just x^2+y^2+z^2+w^2 = r^2.

Also, you don't need to do Riemann sums, this can all be done in closed form.

Rubix was just illustrating a way to think about it.

Oh, and it's tori or toruses.

Also, time is a good fourth dimension and (with space) makes for a cool geometry.

[foilman8805]

Re: The World's Greatest Riddle

That's a pretty...interesting...example there blu, but that is indeed a hypercube.

I don't have a hard time envisioning a hypercube, but a hypersphere is something I can't get my mind around.

EDIT: What I meant by Reimann sum was an integral. Pretty much the same thing.

[bluguerrilla]

Re: The World's Greatest Riddle

They are the same in a limit. Usually when you talk about them you're resorting to some numerical method.

Also, if you think it's hard to envision a hypersphere try this on for size: axiom of choice ftw

[foilman8805]

Re: The World's Greatest Riddle

Jesus, you scared everyone out of the thread, great. Hahaha.

Anyways, I checked out that link, and that is quite an incredible theory, especially the part about obtaining infinitely many balls from one. Now the kids will always have something to play with!

Unless balls go extinct...

[xXDominationxLyfexX]

Re: The World's Greatest Riddle

Lol, i remember that in a myspace bulletin last year and i couldn't
figure it out..but it's the sun ;D

[devonin]

Re: The World's Greatest Riddle

*sigh* did you -read- the thread? There's almost certainly no actual answer, and the clever point it makes is that children are willing to admit their ignorance whereas people who are supposed to be very smart refuse to admit that they don't know the answer.

The alternative references a children's rhyme that looks to be quite old, and probably was completely made up by a smartass trying to answer the riddle themselves, since I've managed to find no reference to that rhyme outside discussions of the riddle.

[MrRubix]

Re: The World's Greatest Riddle

"97% of Harvard graduates have never been able to figure this out. 84% of pre-school students have figured it out in 6 minutes our less."

I absolutely hate bullcrap statistics like this. "Oh ho ho look a preschooler is smarter than a Harvard graduate huhuhuhu what a good riddle." Omfg, moronic.

[LLaMaSaUceYup]

Re: The World's Greatest Riddle

I read the whole thread.

Yeah I just started getting confused when rubix took over about toruses, lol ;D.

The alternative references a children's rhyme that looks to be quite old, and probably was completely made up by a smartass trying to answer the riddle themselves, since I've managed to find no reference to that rhyme outside discussions of the riddle.

Hahaha, probably ;]
edit:
Yeah rubix I've seen those other places too, lies lies ;p