For my part, I knew about hydra games and had forgotten the name, but the context made it fairly obvious that this was a joke about the hydra being so hard to kill that you can’t prove you do it with only Peano arithmetic.
670? Lucky. I finally bested it after 1750-ish, yesterday. Once I hit 1000, I thought, “Why am I doing this? What am I proving?” and then I started clicking again.
1750? I forced myself to give up and get back to work somewhere around the 6500 mark.
(I had decided, somewhere around 1000 or so, to try out the strategy of preferring to cut normal rather than dire heads when possible. Maybe that’s a bad idea)
I worked top-to-bottom, without change. If a new branch grew higher than my previous cuts, I focused it immediately. I know there’s an optimal way, but I’m not quite clever enough to think of it.
I got it too, and I think Eliezer was vastly under confident in his estimate of the number of people who would get it: We have a very mathy community around here.
In any case, I am glad Eliezer ended up including it. HPMOR is good enough to make me actually laugh out loud at least once every chapter, and the bit about the hydras was chapter 100′s contribution.
Chapter 99 made me laugh, just because I read the author notes beforehand due to how they updated in my RSS reader and was fearing something as mental as worm 27b
I found it jarring. Either the characters were making jokes at a very uncharacteristic time, or just saying things that make no sense; either way this derails them. It seems to be a general problem in fanfic.
That (the mathematical hydras related to ordinal arithmetic) can’t possibly be how hydras operate in that world. Wizards don’t know ordinal arithmetic, they only go on experience, and experience would tell them that a hydra with more than a few heads is impossible to kill. The mathematical existence of success is irrelevant when it takes longer than the age of the universe.
These are wizards. They can do, if not quite everything, a lot that we consider impossible or insanely hard. Maybe hydras have the magic property that they “stop time” nearby. For anyone near a hydra, time seems to freeze, at least until the hydra is dead. So if they can kill the hydra, the world pops back to normal with not a second past since the hyda attacked, but if not, they just get eaten.
This is a powerful attack/defense mechanism for the hydra, as the hydra’s opponent must spend eon upon eon fighting it to win, and almost all give up before then.
At least, that is how I imagine Eliezer would write it if that kind of hydras appeared in canon and Eliezer had to come up with a reasonable explanation to it. Many things “don’t make sense”. How can dragons fly? They are to big to reasonably do so. But an intelligent author can “fix” things, and give a reasonable explanation.
Eliezer did that a lot to certain things from canon, and such is the correct attitude for facing a fictional thing you deem “impossible”.
In that case, fighting hydras is something that any decently curious Wizard should attempt as a matter of course. Even if you’re spending most of your effort watching the hydra, it still gives you a long time to think. No way (unless that’s part of the hydra’s spell) that you’re coming out of that experience the same person!
Well, none of the commenters explicitly mentioned the relevance of ‘second order’ and ‘comprehend’, and some gave indications they didn’t notice those hidden puns. Personally, I read the author’s note before the chapters themselves so I knew it was coming, but I believe I would have noticed it anyways. However, I didn’t recognize the name Paris until after looking it up.
I mentioned that I laughed aloud at the hydra joke. the actual specific point which I laughed out loud at though, was the “second order, iterate” part. It was just so… appropriate, if out of context and only that way due to the speaker’s accent.
OK, I got those puns, but didn’t get the hydra reference (I’d never heard of them), and I spent some time trying to figure out what they were related to.
I got about 80% of the joke—I pattern-matched the description to being something like Tbbqfgrva’f gurberz, but I didn’t recognize the names Paris or Buchholz.
Eliezer: I got the math joke.
Explanation and implementation (spoiler if you haven’t spotted the joke yet): http://tinyurl.com/hpmor100mathjoke
(But this only covers the first half of the joke; I had not heard of the second half before!)
If you want to play with a (rather tame, since it doesn’t always use its regeneration powers) Bucholz Hydra, here’s a link for you: http://www.madore.org/~david/math/hydra.xhtml
For my part, I knew about hydra games and had forgotten the name, but the context made it fairly obvious that this was a joke about the hydra being so hard to kill that you can’t prove you do it with only Peano arithmetic.
I have defeated the hydra! (I had to cut off 670 heads). Feels like playing Diablo.
670? Lucky. I finally bested it after 1750-ish, yesterday. Once I hit 1000, I thought, “Why am I doing this? What am I proving?” and then I started clicking again.
1750? I forced myself to give up and get back to work somewhere around the 6500 mark.
(I had decided, somewhere around 1000 or so, to try out the strategy of preferring to cut normal rather than dire heads when possible. Maybe that’s a bad idea)
I worked top-to-bottom, without change. If a new branch grew higher than my previous cuts, I focused it immediately. I know there’s an optimal way, but I’m not quite clever enough to think of it.
Well, for this applet the optimal strategy might depend heavily on how exactly its tameness is executed, which isn’t very enlightening.
Edit: Derp, I tried out top-to-bottom and got it in 572. Definitely better than left-to-right or normals-first-ltr.
I used top-to-bottom, but dires first on each level, and that seemed to work consistently pretty well.
I got it too, and I think Eliezer was vastly under confident in his estimate of the number of people who would get it: We have a very mathy community around here.
In any case, I am glad Eliezer ended up including it. HPMOR is good enough to make me actually laugh out loud at least once every chapter, and the bit about the hydras was chapter 100′s contribution.
Chapter 99?
OK, fine. But that wasn’t a real chapter.
Chapter 99 made me laugh, just because I read the author notes beforehand due to how they updated in my RSS reader and was fearing something as mental as worm 27b
I found it jarring. Either the characters were making jokes at a very uncharacteristic time, or just saying things that make no sense; either way this derails them. It seems to be a general problem in fanfic.
How come? They were not saying things that make no sense, if that is how hydras operate in that world...
That (the mathematical hydras related to ordinal arithmetic) can’t possibly be how hydras operate in that world. Wizards don’t know ordinal arithmetic, they only go on experience, and experience would tell them that a hydra with more than a few heads is impossible to kill. The mathematical existence of success is irrelevant when it takes longer than the age of the universe.
These are wizards. They can do, if not quite everything, a lot that we consider impossible or insanely hard. Maybe hydras have the magic property that they “stop time” nearby. For anyone near a hydra, time seems to freeze, at least until the hydra is dead. So if they can kill the hydra, the world pops back to normal with not a second past since the hyda attacked, but if not, they just get eaten.
This is a powerful attack/defense mechanism for the hydra, as the hydra’s opponent must spend eon upon eon fighting it to win, and almost all give up before then.
At least, that is how I imagine Eliezer would write it if that kind of hydras appeared in canon and Eliezer had to come up with a reasonable explanation to it. Many things “don’t make sense”. How can dragons fly? They are to big to reasonably do so. But an intelligent author can “fix” things, and give a reasonable explanation.
Eliezer did that a lot to certain things from canon, and such is the correct attitude for facing a fictional thing you deem “impossible”.
In that case, fighting hydras is something that any decently curious Wizard should attempt as a matter of course. Even if you’re spending most of your effort watching the hydra, it still gives you a long time to think. No way (unless that’s part of the hydra’s spell) that you’re coming out of that experience the same person!
Well over periods of time that long, you might come out of it a new person who differs from the old one by being bugfuck crazy.
Well, none of the commenters explicitly mentioned the relevance of ‘second order’ and ‘comprehend’, and some gave indications they didn’t notice those hidden puns. Personally, I read the author’s note before the chapters themselves so I knew it was coming, but I believe I would have noticed it anyways. However, I didn’t recognize the name Paris until after looking it up.
I mentioned that I laughed aloud at the hydra joke. the actual specific point which I laughed out loud at though, was the “second order, iterate” part. It was just so… appropriate, if out of context and only that way due to the speaker’s accent.
OK, I got those puns, but didn’t get the hydra reference (I’d never heard of them), and I spent some time trying to figure out what they were related to.
I got about 80% of the joke—I pattern-matched the description to being something like Tbbqfgrva’f gurberz, but I didn’t recognize the names Paris or Buchholz.