Thought today’s smbc comic was too funny not to share. Source

    • nialv7@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Sure but combinatorially that’s very small… 1400 a-z characters will have numbers of combinations exceed that number.

      • Cypher@aussie.zone
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        1 day ago

        No. Go read the wiki and then try working out how large 10^2000 is.

        Then do some quick maths on the combinations of phonetics (read the comic again to work out why phonetics and not combinations of a-z characters).

        Then have your mind blown by how many orders of magnitude you’re away from being correct.

        Or be incurious and fail to take this opportunity to comprehend the universe a tiny bit better.

        • Natanael@infosec.pub
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          1 day ago

          Log2(10^2000) = 6643 bits

          In other words, every entry in the lookup can be mapped to a 0.8 KiB string. That means for any sequence longer than 0.8 KiB, there MUST be a permutation you can make which has no answer (pigeonhole principle). Because so many entries answers long structured sentences, short random ones must mostly be filtered out.

          This text itself is past halfway to that limit. If I doubled the length then lookup-only is no longer possible and a logic parser is an absolute must. Applying compression to the query only increases what can be answered by a fixed factor.

          • frank@sopuli.xyz
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            1 day ago

            I think you’re off by 2 bits (round up and don’t forget to always add 1 at the end), but regardless I think the comparison doesn’t work.

            True that it would be comparable in size to a 0.8 KiB string but not necessarily in complexity. If his lookup table didn’t do it by character but by word or sound it could have a ton more information stored there.

            Your comment stored as a string isn’t nearly maximally information dense, like you’ve made god’s info

            • lad@programming.dev
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              14 hours ago

              Even if you compress it by 99.9% losslessly, it will only make it ≈ 0.8MB, which is big but not that big

        • bequirtle@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          going by phonemes, assuming we must alternate vowel and consonant phonemes, 10^2000 combinations covers a maximum length of about 1500 phonemes.

          • Cypher@aussie.zone
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            1 day ago

            Humans have the ability to produce about 600 different consonant sounds and 200 vowel sounds so it seems safe to say all bases are covered.

            • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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              14 hours ago

              But we’re talking permutations of sound combinations that can be of arbitrary length. Going by that alternating consonant/vowel pattern above (which simplifies it because you can have consecutive consonant or vowel sounds in words and phrases), the numbers of pairs would be 120,000. That’s less more than 100,000, so for each pair in a phrase, you add at least 5 0s to the total possibilities. 2000 / 5 is 400. Unless I screwed something up, that means the maximum length of a query is 400 consonant/vowel pairs before you have to introduce gaps (which goes against the random noises that got responses). Halve that because it can start with either a consonant or vowel sound.

              A rough estimate of the number of sounds in the above paragraph is something like 225, and I simplified my count by ignoring consecutive consonant sounds (which it is full of).

              Like yeah, 10 to the 2000 is a huge number but when you’re dealing with permutations, you use up numbers very fast. A more popular counter example is the stat about the total number of permutations for a deck of cards, where they say if you shuffle it well, you probably have a unique sequence of cards that has never been seen before. Iirc, that number is within a the ballpark of the order of magnitude of that total atoms in observable universe estimation. And that’s just with 52 possibilities and no repetition (calculated by factorial, whereas sound combination possibilities grows even faster and isn’t limited to 52 options).

              Edit: corrected that bit where I rounded the 120,000 to 100,000 to simplify the math by looking for a minimal value rather than the actual value.

            • bequirtle@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              More sounds doesn’t make it better lol. With that many, you get a max length of around 700-800 sounds