Linear programming, and even integer linear programming are pretty well solved practically speaking.

> Unless you’re talking about advanced PR and market manipulation techniques to capture and retain ad revenue

Those very much _are_ the goals at those enterprises.

Those weren’t really the topics people were interested in at the time (depending on your definition of AI).

The shoulders of giants, as they say.

The line about filename shenanigans being disallowed.

>A FAQ for the newsgroup is not automatically part of the rules for the challenge.

I think it’s completely clear that this FAQ was about the challenge.

I don’t follow. Wouldn’t that be (because not random)

What is the distribution of the complexity of a string? Is there some Chernof-like bound?

Treat an n bit file as a polynomial over the finite field with characteristic 2. Now, there are some irreducible polynomials in this field, but many polynomials have factors of x and of (x+1). Factor the polynomial into P(x)x^n (x+1)^m. and just collect these terms, storing only P, n, and m.

However, this restriction is too much for the purposes of this challenge. We don’t actually need a file with low entropy, in fact I claim that a weak file exists for files with entropy 8 (the maximum entropy value) - epsilon for each epsilon > 0.

What we actually need is a sufficiently large chunk in a file to have low entropy. The largeness is in absolute terms, not relative terms.

A very simple file would be taking a very large file with maximum entropy and adding 200 0’s to the end. This would not decrease the entropy of the file much, but it gives way to a compression algorithm that should be able to save ~100 bytes

>Why chose a 'return' method that is only for some investors?

The investors control the company, so they get to decide that.

I would love if you elaborated on that

I notice I stay on threads longer, often thinking “people can’t possibly believe this nonsense,” and I notice that I’m angry after using it for some time. I stay on Bluesky for much shorter periods, and I often feel peaceful (even bordering on bored) after a session.