Here are my answers to the Archetype puzzle I presented last week. If you haven’t seen it yet, go read that first. This entire post is a spoiler.
Oh, and feel free to quibble with my answers in the comments.
1. Red and blue balls in an urn
Probability, combinatorics
2. Galapagos finches
Evolution, allopatric speciation or adaptive radiation
3. Alice, Bob, and Eve
Cryptography, eavesdropping
4. A spherical cow
Theoretical physics, simplifying approximation
5. Lynx and snowshoe hare
Community ecology, predator-prey dynamics
6. Brain-in-a-vat
Epistemology (Philosophy is acceptable, too), solipsism
7. “Hello, world!”
Computer science, programming
8. The monkey and the hunter
Newtonian physics, gravity
9. The babysitting cooperative
Macroeconomics, the paradox of thrift
Bonus (2 points): What follows? Up, up, down, down
left, right, left, right, B, A (you may also include ‘select, start’ or just ‘start’ at the end)
4 comments
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Jeremy Fox
March 10, 2016 at 3:05 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Ok, I nearly ran the table except for 7 and 8, with 8 being the only one for which I had no clue. So since I’m too lazy to google it: what does the monkey and the hunter have to do with Newtonian gravity? Is it an analogy to a two-body problem in which the two masses end up “chasing” each other around a shared orbit?
Margaret Kosmala
March 12, 2016 at 4:00 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Since I’m too lazy to write out an explanation when there are plenty of good ones already on the Interwebs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey_and_the_Hunter
Jeremy Fox
March 13, 2016 at 10:33 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Touche. 🙂
Jeremy Fox
March 13, 2016 at 10:37 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
p.s. I imagine that you never get tired of hearing people say “touche'”, do you? 🙂