Rare Encounter

Invading Russia, NPing in the toilet, and avoiding Superman's creampie.

Executive producer: boo-bury

Show Notes

Flow Map of Napoleon's Invasion of Russia - Age of Revolution

P = NP?

Fifty years of P vs. NP and the possibility of the impossible | Communications of the ACM

Fifty-one, now.

P versus NP problem - Wikipedia

Consider Sudoku, a game where the player is given a partially filled-in grid of numbers and attempts to complete the grid following certain rules. Given an incomplete Sudoku grid, of any size, is there at least one legal solution? Any proposed solution is easily verified, and the time to check a solution grows slowly (polynomially) as the grid gets bigger. However, all known algorithms for finding solutions take, for difficult examples, time that grows exponentially as the grid gets bigger. So, Sudoku is in NP (quickly checkable) but does not seem to be in P (quickly solvable). Thousands of other problems seem similar, in that they are fast to check but slow to solve. Researchers have shown that many of the problems in NP have the extra property that a fast solution to any one of them could be used to build a quick solution to any other problem in NP, a property called NP-completeness. Decades of searching have not yielded a fast solution to any of these problems, so most scientists suspect that none of these problems can be solved quickly. This, however, has never been proven.

Clique problem - Wikipedia

Given a group of people, who are the members of the largest clique (subgroup where all members are mutual friends with each other)?

This is an example of an NP-complete problem. We can easily and quickly verify a solution, but determining a correct solution in the first place might as well be done in a slow, brute-force way since there are no general optimizations that could be made for determining a solution.

"Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex"

There are a lot of difficulties to overcome if Superman and Lois Lane were to have a baby.

The problem is this. Electroencephalograms taken of men and women during sexual intercourse show that orgasm resembles "a kind of pleasurable epileptic attack." One loses control over one's muscles.

Superman has been known to leave his fingerprints in steel and in hardened concrete, accidentally. What would he to to the woman in his arms during what amounts to an epileptic fit?

Eve Online fans literally cheer Microsoft Excel features at annual Fanfest | Ars Technica

Spreadsheets IN SPAAAACE!!!!!

💬⚡ Boost Bot ⚡💬 (@BoostBot@social.v4v.dev) - Value 4 Value Development Social

The Yamdalorian is the Star Wars/Mr. Potato Head Mashup We Didn’t Know We Needed

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List of potato cultivars - Wikipedia

Adirondack Red - Wikipedia

The hamtato.

Potato party

Microsoft FrontPage - Wikipedia

Vermeer Technologies - Wikipedia

David Gerrold - Wikipedia

Trials and Tribble-ations - Wikipedia