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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 4th, 2023
  • What you want is a distribution-aware contextual binary search. With whatever information you have (appearance, personality, vocabulary, etc), you can come up with a probability distribution in the space of possible ages and start your guess with the value at the 50th percentile. Then depending on whether the true age is higher or lower, your next guess will be either the 25th or 75th percentile. Rinse and repeat.

    In reality, the way most people intuitively do agree guessing is already an approximation of this procedure.

  • Having to maintain large states is key. I’ve learned recently that this is why I keep starting so many new projects instead of finishing things. The larger a project becomes, the larger the states I have to hold in my head and the fewer opportunities I have to rebuild and maintain that state. So if I want to do some coding, the only option available is usually to start something new with a blank slate.