One must imagine Sisyphus clicking.
February 21, 2019 5:56 AM   Subscribe

 
That 53rd step is a doozy.
posted by DigDoug at 6:05 AM on February 21, 2019 [8 favorites]


disappointed they didn't go with a bigdecimal type for Zeno - there must be a js bigdecimal implementation
posted by idiopath at 6:08 AM on February 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


Not being able to drag Prometheus label when dragging Prometheus icon ... is that a bug or a feature?
posted by a complicated history at 6:26 AM on February 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


Not being able to drag Prometheus label when dragging Prometheus icon ... is that a bug or a feature?

Have we learned nothing, to seek deep knowledge so casually?
posted by BS Artisan at 6:37 AM on February 21, 2019 [8 favorites]


Prometheus is unbound?
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 6:45 AM on February 21, 2019 [6 favorites]


PROTIP: Double click the icons.
posted by genpfault at 6:48 AM on February 21, 2019 [7 favorites]


I beat the Sisyphus one by using the arrow keys on the slider and the mouse on the button. I'm a little disappointed that Hades didn't pop up and smite me for that.
posted by mattamatic at 6:49 AM on February 21, 2019 [4 favorites]


I beat the Sisyphus one by using the arrow keys on the slider and the mouse on the button. I'm a little disappointed that Hades didn't pop up and smite me for that.

You do get a little note in the javascript console: "This shouldn't be possible."
posted by jedicus at 7:02 AM on February 21, 2019 [4 favorites]


Cute. It also closes the tab whenever I try to back out of any one of them - something something you can never escape your punishment?
posted by cage and aquarium at 7:19 AM on February 21, 2019


so I'm like, hey. there's a finite amount of representable floating-point numbers. eventually if we keep taking steps half the size of our previous step, the next step is going to be smaller than the smallest value that the system can represent. At that point either Zeno will either let me advance to step two (which means I win) or stop advancing (which means Zeno is cheating (which means I win)).

So I click a little while, and then eventually I get something like this:1

55
Σ (1/2)n
n=0

and I shake my head sadly, and I'm like:

Zeno. Zeno. You know I'm just going to keep clicking until that 55 overflows, right? It might have been different back in ancient Greece,2 but now, these days, you're trapped in a computer. Your world is discrete, bro, and I am patient.

1: pony request: LaTeX in mefi comments
2: MAYBE.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 7:21 AM on February 21, 2019 [31 favorites]


This doesn't feel much different than dealing with the cookie/privacy/newsletter/GDPR/you've-used-your-last-free-article/turn-off-your-adblocker/let-us-send-you-browser-notifications/OMFG-which-tab-is-making-noise nonsense that is the internet in 2019.
posted by cilantro at 7:22 AM on February 21, 2019 [9 favorites]


Your world is discrete, bro, and I am patient.

Wasn't Zeno's original paradox also meant to be an argument for atomism?
posted by traveler_ at 7:40 AM on February 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


I understand Zeno to be providing a mathematical proof of Parmenidesā€˜s ideas about changelessness.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:57 AM on February 21, 2019 [4 favorites]


this reminded me of bad phone number input forms.
posted by entropone at 8:04 AM on February 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


hey could we not get into arguments about zeno? they never go anywhere, and they never end...
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 8:15 AM on February 21, 2019 [24 favorites]


(hey, it's always better than both having and not having the argument about Schroedinger's cat...)
posted by entropone at 8:22 AM on February 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


I mean, yes and no.
posted by gauche at 8:29 AM on February 21, 2019 [8 favorites]


PROTIP: Double click the icons.

Hades hands you a business card with this printed on it, when you first enter the underworld.
posted by Fizz at 8:38 AM on February 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


I'm pretty sure I've run into some web-based menus that work exactly like the Sisyphus model -- you scroll to activate them, but then as you scroll off the header bar, the scroll deactivates and the menu goes away. Repeat.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:39 AM on February 21, 2019 [5 favorites]


on further consideration you could do the Zeno one without bigdecimal types or sigma notation, no rule says the number displayed on screen needs to be an input to your algorithm
posted by idiopath at 8:46 AM on February 21, 2019



.....Zeno. Zeno. You know I'm just going to keep clicking until that 55 overflows, right?....
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon


Mefi-User-Name: replace "LU" with "UR".
posted by lalochezia at 8:51 AM on February 21, 2019 [9 favorites]


That's really more iterative than recursive.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:53 AM on February 21, 2019 [4 favorites]


yeah, I tried being recursive, but then I realized that when I call myself it just makes my problems bigger.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 8:55 AM on February 21, 2019 [11 favorites]


s/re/dis/, then.
posted by boo_radley at 9:11 AM on February 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


At the risk of being pedantic, Zeno doesn't actually fit. The others are actually mythological punishments, whereas Zeno's Paradox is just a thought experiment.

OTOH, if you wanted a mythological figure, you could always go with Zeno's second paradox, and pretend that Achilles's afterlife consisted of footraces with turtles.

(And, yes, like many others here, I confused Sisyphus's dialog box by using keyboard shortcuts, and tried to make the float in Zeno hit a roundoff-error threshold.)
posted by jackbishop at 9:22 AM on February 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


dislusive!
posted by XtinaS at 9:25 AM on February 21, 2019


new account who disclusive
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 9:39 AM on February 21, 2019 [10 favorites]


Yeah, I thought atomism was, in part, conceived to rescue the idea of change from Zeno's argument.
posted by biogeo at 10:07 AM on February 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


I'm viewing the site in Internet Explorer.

Sisyphus nods his approval.
posted by clawsoon at 10:12 AM on February 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


> Yeah, I thought atomism was, in part, conceived to rescue the idea of change from Zeno's argument.

it's a useful philosophical exercise to take Parmenides's stance on the impossibility of change or motion seriously though, even if the arguments made by his attack dog Zeno were a bit gimmicky. There's good reason to think that nothing about the universe is anything like what it appears to us — that categories like time, change, motion, absence, difference, without which we can't structure the world as it appears to us, have no actual reality. Positing atomism to dismiss Zeno's gimmicks ("but what if there were things you couldn't divide huh what if there was a distance you couldn't halve huh zeno what then?") doesn't actually address Parmenides's underlying challenge to our habit of treating existence as it appears to us as being genuinely real.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 10:30 AM on February 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


This is just silly enough.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:12 AM on February 21, 2019


so we've got two groups here, one that thinks the zeno bit works, and another that thinks the zeno bit is out of place because zeno was making a philosophical argument about the impossibility of change, but all the other examples were of mythological torments in hades.

what I would like to quietly politely suggest is that perhaps these two groups should... meet halfway.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 11:25 AM on February 21, 2019 [8 favorites]


hey could we not get into arguments about zeno? they never go anywhere, and they never end...

Well, you're half right.
posted by The Bellman at 11:42 AM on February 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


You know I'm just going to keep clicking until that 55 overflows, right?
Holy crap, they do know. I dug around to check after seeing your comment, and: although the 55 doesn't overflow until it reaches 2^53-1, they still put a special case in the zeno.js code for that. After you've done those 9-quadrillion-odd clicks, every new click gives you a message selected randomly from the array:

"Almost there!",
"Keep going!",
"Just a few more steps!",
"Don't give up!",
"The end is in sight!",
"You can do this!",
"You're doing great!",
"Keep stepping!",
"One foot after the next!",
"You've got this!",
"Don't stop!",
"Keep clicking \"Next\"!"

The sigma notation was where I went from "this is stupid" to "this is clever", but now we're at "this is brilliant". Going to check the other scripts for more easter eggs.
posted by roystgnr at 11:53 AM on February 21, 2019 [11 favorites]


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