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This is fiendishly clever; you more than made up for a lack of technical skills by exploiting the wetware angle. Lovely little story :)

I absolutely love that this is not some parody of cyberpunk fiction, but instead reality.

On a VAX no less! Can't imagine there's an HFT arbitrage opportunity for such "slow" tech.

I, too, grew up on the first-ever Zoombinis game. I actually recently played through it again almost 15+ years later. Everything from the sound effects to the visuals is seared somewhere deep in my neural wetware like a permanent ROM chip. Funnily enough, some of the puzzles still confused me! I guess my colorblindness certainly hasn't been magically cured over time...

Thanks so much to OP for linking this article.

Thanks for the reply! I didn't know the standardized IPA was in fact with an "r." Strange though, because to me the umlauted-o sound is probably one of the easiest German pronunciations to do for an English speaker. Also, good point on the compiled/interpreted (using a programming analogy) divide in pronunciation of borrowed words. I do suppose there is plenty of evidence of butchered French terms already, so why not ruin some other language's beautiful sounds too! groaning laughter

Though, I should not be all that surprised. For my entire life in the U.S. people have pronounced my last name of "Wiese" as either "Wise" or "Why-se," both of which are totally incorrect (my family says "Weese" when anglicized). I much prefer the German pronunciation of my last name, though; too bad it's too much of a pain to explain the discrepancy between how it's spelt and what it sounds like to native English speakers. :P

That "Girdle" pronunciation is like nails on a chalkboard! The umlaut is an oo (or ue) sound. There is no "r" anywhere! As both a philosophy student and German speaker, whenever my professors pronounced it like that I shuddered in my seat.

I'm sure actual native German speakers could probably chime in, but I couldn't help but try to stop the spread of FUD around pronouncing poor ol' Gödel's name. :)

As a philosophy major, at my university we do so in our "Advanced Symbolic Logic" class. However, the depth with which you engage with Gödel's theorem depends on the professor teaching it and their interests when designing the course (we have 2 specializing in mathematical logic who flip back and forth iirc).

I took the class just last semester in Spring.

That is an absolutely fascinating application that I've never considered before. One could design all sorts of experiments, not just exclusively spatial reasoning.

Imagine allowing a class of undergraduate students to participate in a version of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment and draw their own conclusions as to potential flaws in its methodology.

Or, as a philosophy student: allow students to engage in a real life rendition of Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment, where a student "competes" against his or her classmates and various versions of text generation algorithms from simple Markov chain generators, to OpenAI's GPT-2 and beyond.

The incompetence originates from the disregard of the parent commenter's question/concern. It's the result of not engaging in good faith with your student, not necessarily the conclusions drawn. As I mentioned in my original comment, the value in taking a philosophy class (especially as a student in a different field) is the chance to engage with both the professor and your peers; it serves as a veritable petri dish for developing one's ability to succinctly articulate and debate topics. If you're expected to sit in a philosophy class and just absorb the material without any contrary thought, something is seriously awry. It goes against the very nature of why humans pursued philosophy in the first place.

Furthermore, it seems strange for a professor of philosophy to so easily dismiss criticism out of hand. Of all subjects, a philosophy professor has a pedagogical imperative to entertain contradictory positions and explain why or why not one ought to follow a line of reasoning. In addition, the question about the merit of a small sample size could itself serve as a valuable aside in teaching fundamental notions in the philosophy of science.

Note: This is from the perspective of Western analytic philosophy, but the spirit of debate and discussion is no less integral to the continental tradition.

I'm sorry an incompetent professor left such a bad taste in your mouth, and on the field as a whole.

What's strange to me, is that my interpretation of the results of such an experiment wouldn't even lead to your professor's conclusion. The takeaway being the fallibility of sensory perception, where I might then prompt the class for a discussion of their intuitive refutations of empiricism before diving into the literature.

Unfortunately, being a philosophy major myself, I know all too well that a crap teacher can totally ruin a philosophy topic (let alone a topic of any subject). From my 4 years in philosophy classes of varying levels of difficulty, the common denominator between a fruitful time spent in class has been the willingness of the professor to engage with their students. Whether it's logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, &c, the principal property of a quality professor is his/her dialectical ability.

Hell, that's how philosophy & theology was taught in the first universities! The professor would profess and then the students would engage their master in the subject at hand.

Just wanted to say that I always enjoy seeing a t3x.org link pop up on the front page of HN. Your site is one of the few "regulars" that I always enjoy seeing a new update from; your projects are always interesting and I can usually learn something new just by perusing the manual and looking at the code to discern how a feature was implemented.

> There is no space to drive my tractor collection around.

I am glad to see a comment like this on HN, despite the impression that everyone here is an SV-focused tech bro. Sometimes it feels good to read about somebody's tractors whilst I gaze out at the soybean field in my backyard. :)