Oh, yeah, I thought you really meant that you would force that "baby" down. :) Nice to hear that you wouldn't. Not even "lazy evaluation" would save you there 7-8 hours later. ;) /Gf On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 10:00 PM, Andrew Coppin wrote:

Gianfranco Alongi wrote:

...

Maybe I haven't done enough haskell, but enough lisp to NOT eat _2_ Kg of chocolate. Did you really think you would get those 2 Kg's down?

Oh, no. The entire bar is 2 Kg, I wasn't actually planning to eat the whole thing! o_O My god, my pancreas would explode or something...

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Simon Brenner wrote:

2kg of chocolate 'thunks' to 'force' really might 'blow your stack' later on.

Oh my god, this one made me laugh so hard I almost choked on the piece of chocolate I was just eating. It should definitely make it into HWN Quotes of the Week... Cheers Ben

Paul Johnson wrote:

Andrew Coppin wrote:

...

Oh, no. The entire bar is 2 Kg, I wasn't actually planning to eat the whole thing! o_O My god, my pancreas would explode or something...

My Dad once ate two bars of dark cooking chocolate. He said he got some odd visual distortions; flickering auras around things, and size distortions where small things looked big and big things looked small.

I understand that chocolate does contain chemicals which are actually moderately toxic. (It just doesn't contain very much of them - or at least, the normal *milk* chocolate doesn't. Dark chocolate would presumably contain more of these.) For what it's worth, 80% of my diet is cheese, and 10% is chocolate. Apparently that particular combination is supposed to have all sorts of dire effects (including severe headaches). I suffer no such symptoms that I'm aware of. Never have. (But then, people tell me they get a "lift" from caffine, and I find no such effect. Nor do I have severe withdrawal symptoms when I stop taking it.) Maybe I'm just weird? (Oh, wait... I use Haskell!) In other news... apparently chocolate is leathaly toxic to dogs. Random.

On 3 Oct 2008, at 23:50, Andrew Coppin wrote:

For what it's worth, 80% of my diet is cheese, and 10% is chocolate.

Remind me not to take food out of your hands, OK?

What /is/ it with haskell-cafe lately? Do we need a haskell-blah mailing list? I would subscribe to that. Hell, I would post to it probably more than I post to haskell-cafe. But I'd also divert it to a separate mailbox for when I have too much free time. Maybe call it haskell-cafe-cafe? not-haskell? --Lane

On 2008 Oct 3, at 21:01, Christopher Lane Hinson wrote:

What /is/ it with haskell-cafe lately?

Do we need a haskell-blah mailing list? I would subscribe to that. Hell, I would post to it probably more than I post to haskell-cafe. But I'd also divert it to a separate mailbox for when I have too much free time.

Oddly enough, it seems to me that haskell-*cafe* identifies a list that isn't tightly focused, as compared to haskell@haskell.org. Perhaps we need to rethink names (although any changes will probably hurt). -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH

Christopher Lane Hinson wrote:

What /is/ it with haskell-cafe lately?

Do we need a haskell-blah mailing list? I would subscribe to that. Hell, I would post to it probably more than I post to haskell-cafe. But I'd also divert it to a separate mailbox for when I have too much free time.

Maybe call it haskell-cafe-cafe? not-haskell?

I must admit, I have a bunch of abstract math questions I'd like answers to, and the people round here seem like the kind of folks who might know the answers. But this has nothing at all to do with Haskell, so Cafe doesn't seem like a good place to ask...

On Oct 3, 2008, at 15:38 , Paul Johnson wrote:

Andrew Coppin wrote:

...

Oh, no. The entire bar is 2 Kg, I wasn't actually planning to eat the whole thing! o_O My god, my pancreas would explode or something... My Dad once ate two bars of dark cooking chocolate. He said he got some odd visual distortions; flickering auras around things, and size distortions where small things looked big and big things looked small.

Theobromine is interesting stuff. -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH

Hallo, Andrew Coppin wrote:

Anton van Straaten wrote:

...

You're not alone:

http://xkcd.com/245/

Heh. Randel appears to have not heard of Haskell. He thinks _Lisp_ is the ultimate language. ;-)

Well, at least he's close, let's wait till he finds out about Scheme. :-) Cheers, -alex http://www.ventonegro.org/

It seems like if your primitive operation is "break bar in two" you need exactly n-1 breaks to get n squares, no matter what choice you make for where to break along the chocolate grid. This is a simple consequence of the fact that each break increases the number of pieces by one. If you're allowed to hold multiple pieces in your hand when you do the break it's different. Then you need a model of how the hands hold the chocolate. I think there is a problem when the breaks get complicated, as if you have to hold the pieces for too long while setting up the break, some of the chocolate will melt onto your fingers. -- ryan On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 12:56 AM, apfelmus wrote:

Andrew Coppin wrote:

...

The other day, I sat down to eat a 2 Kg block of chocolate - one of those ones that's divided into lots of little squares. I proceeded to recursively subdivide it into smaller and smaller blocks, and then eat the individual squares in depth-first order. It was only after getting through 16 of the things that I stopped to notice that the whole bar just happens to have an exact power of two squares on it.

And it was some time after *that* when I thought to myself "...woah, maybe do too much Haskell?" o_O

Seriously, who recursively subdivides their food? I think I have something wrong with me...

A much more important question is: how many "break bar in two" operations did you perform? Can you do it with less?

Regards, apfelmus

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On Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:54:17 +0200, Adrian Neumann wrote:

I often wonder how many cuts you need to divide a steak in n pieces. You can obviously get n pieces with (sqrt n) cuts by cutting a grid. But I'm sure some smart mathematician thought of a (log n) way.

Good thing that the chocolate slab was only 2 kg and of finite length. Had it been of infinite length, we would need Dedekind cuts to partition it.... ;) -- Benjamin L. Russell

Benjamin L.Russell wrote:

On Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:54:17 +0200, Adrian Neumann wrote:

...

I often wonder how many cuts you need to divide a steak in n pieces. You can obviously get n pieces with (sqrt n) cuts by cutting a grid. But I'm sure some smart mathematician thought of a (log n) way.

Good thing that the chocolate slab was only 2 kg and of finite length. Had it been of infinite length, we would need Dedekind cuts to partition it.... ;)

You know, it's interesting... I posted this in another forum, and people just said "dude, why would you try to eat a whole 2 Kg of chocolate? That's really unhealthy." I post the same thing here and now people are arguing about Dedekind cuts... da HELL?! o_O An interesting dichotomy of perspectives, don't you think?

On Wed, 2008-10-01 at 20:56 +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote: . . .

You know, it's interesting... I posted this in another forum, and people just said "dude, why would you try to eat a whole 2 Kg of chocolate? That's really unhealthy." I post the same thing here and now people are arguing about Dedekind cuts... da HELL?! o_O

An interesting dichotomy of perspectives, don't you think?

Maybe the dichotomy is in the distribution of free-wheeling imagination. I'm reminded of the (apocryphal?) story about Hilbert's assessment of poetry and mathematics. -- Bill Wood

Jon Fairbairn wrote:

Adrian Neumann writes:

...

I often wonder how many cuts you need to divide a steak in n pieces. You can obviously get n pieces with (sqrt n) cuts by cutting a grid. But I'm sure some smart mathematician thought of a (log n) way.

Are you allowed to move the pieces between cuts?

Later you're also going to demand to bend it in N dimensions, aren't you? -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for copyright history. All rights reserved. Copying, hiring, renting, performance and/or quoting of this signature prohibited.

Achim Schneider wrote:

Jon Fairbairn wrote:

...

Adrian Neumann writes:

...

I often wonder how many cuts you need to divide a steak in n pieces. You can obviously get n pieces with (sqrt n) cuts by cutting a grid. But I'm sure some smart mathematician thought of a (log n) way. Are you allowed to move the pieces between cuts?

Later you're also going to demand to bend it in N dimensions, aren't you?

If extra dimensions are needed, perhaps the LHC could be pressed into service. Any Haskell programmers working there? I'm sure we could settle many of these questions by injecting some chocolate particles into the accelerator. Who among us hasn't wondered what chocolate looks like when traveling at relativistic speeds? Best case, we produce an infinitely dense micro-black hole made of chocolate, which pretty much takes care of the whole recursive subdividing problem. Plus, when popped into your mouth, it would evaporate via the tastiest Hawking radiation imaginable. Anton

Adrian Neumann writes:

I often wonder how many cuts you need to divide a steak in n pieces. You can obviously get n pieces with (sqrt n) cuts by cutting a grid. But I'm sure some smart mathematician thought of a (log n) way.

You might try the ham sandwich theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich_theorem as an hors d'oeuvre.

The Wikipedia says:

"For a finite set of points in the plane, each colored "red" or "blue", there is a line that simultaneously bisects the red points and bisects the blue points, that is, the number of red points on either side of the line is equal and the number of blue points on either side of the line is equal."

Does this work with more than two colours? i.e. can I recursively subdivide the halves into quarters with another cut?

Am 01.10.2008 um 15:33 schrieb Dominic Steinitz:

Adrian Neumann writes:

...

I often wonder how many cuts you need to divide a steak in n pieces. You can obviously get n pieces with (sqrt n) cuts by cutting a grid. But I'm sure some smart mathematician thought of a (log n) way.

You might try the ham sandwich theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich_theorem as an hors d'oeuvre.

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G'day all. Quoting Adrian Neumann :

I often wonder how many cuts you need to divide a steak in n pieces.

One, if the cut is allowed to be curved and self-intersecting. I think that the spirit of the problem, though is encapsulated in this question: Given a circle, what is the maximum number of pieces that you can divide it into by performing n straight cuts? This is a great problem to set undergraduates, because if you work out some small values of n on paper, you get: n #pieces 0 1 1 2 2 4 3 7 Most undergrads will stall at this point trying to work out how to place the third line to get 8 pieces, and probably come up with an incorrect justification for why it should be 2^n. The details are here: http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/A000124 Cheers, Andrew Bromage