just science related topics. please contribute
note: clickbait sources/headlines aren't liked generally. I've posted crap sources and later deleted or edit to improve after complaints. whoops, sry
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TLDR if you invite over 25 people to a party, you can know that people can cluster in small groups where everyone in the small group knows each other, or everyone is meeting for the first time.
Even the result with 6 people is super neat. Sent me down a rabbit hole of things like Ramsey theorem and the pigeonhole principle. On a side note, the guy Ramsey was a fucking genius.
I've read the whole thing and I feel like there's something that's just assumed that everyone understands.
What exactly is the problem? Why do we care how many people know each other or don't? I'm so confused.
As with many articles in science and math, the discovery isn't that "this weird thing happens", but that "hey, we can model this weird thing using this equation/model (that sometimes comes from a totally unrelated field)." Maybe in 10, 20, 50 years this discovery will become the key to understanding yet another weird thing, and so on.
"Everyone understands" that if you drop an object it falls to the ground. Yet we still don't fully understand how gravitation works.
I understood that. I'm asking about the problem with parties that this helps people fix.
no, the story in the article about Ramsey numbers is just meant to make you the life of your next party. try it, I'm sure people will love the debate.
These types of abstract problems often get applied to physics or various optimization problems where efficient solutions can save a ton of work or enable new techniques
But this seems to claim it solves some practical problem with parties. I don't know what that problems.
It's about what combinations of "nodes" with specific relations to others are possible in a group of different sizes
That's just a simple way to phrase the problem in concrete terms. The immediate applications are usually not of interest, unlike the novel techniques with which hard problems are solved.
I mean socially, do you want to go to a party and be the only person who doesn't know anyone? If you had to pick, I'd imagine you'd either want to catch up with a couple people you do know OR meet new people. The trouble gets when the crowd is a mix of old and new and people feel alienated.
I don't understand how this discovery would prevent that though. You could still get invited to a party with over 25 people where you are the only person who doesn't know anyone.
there's a lot of things that feel like they should be obvious, but are almost impossible to prove mathematically. it's the difference between seeing something happens, and understanding why it happens and proving that it will always happen (or not, and why)
TL;GU (too long, gave up) 😂
But yeah, the first two or three paragraphs are the important parts.
That's a fierce stock photo.
Sometimes you hit, sometimes you miss
Portlandia character vibes
This was really interesting and the website wasn't phone cancer either. Thank you!
ScienceAlert is a genuinely decent source of science news, I have been following it for a long time.
this is some useful info to break out at any party where I'd rather not be re-invited.