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Makes me think about the joke/parable where a young man sits down to write his memoirs only to find himself writing about the act of writing.

Nothing. Mind you, if the basic substrate of the universe exists for eternity and cycles through all possible permutations (massive speculation) then I would expect to exist an infinite number of times. I'm not sure whether this amounts to death?

While that attitude is certainly quite prevalent I would argue that my year group in highschool was a lot more relaxed than that. It's possible to value learning in itself without being focused on the university-->career gateway offered by marks (which is why I very much enjoyed year 11 but not...

Cheers for the link. It's quite interesting, especially the special cases illustrated by the dude 'altoz'. They too seem to find that the problem seems to require recursive algorithms once the parameters exceed certain bounds. Once I drew up a 5x5 matrix/grid and started crossing off horses...

And sadly there doesn't seem to be an elegant expression for the m(m+1)/2 -1 > n cases (You end up with a recursive algorithmic process - i.e. where you use roughly the same procedure as in the 25 horse example - which makes use of division and remainders, so perhaps a modulo arithmetic...

And again... (sleep is not forthcoming) Using brogan's simpler way of expressing things. Suppose that we have n^2 horses which we can race 'n' at a time, but where we want to find the top m fastest horses (where m < n). Again we can run n races of n horses. The winner of each is entered...

Oh dear - I closed my eyes to fall asleep but I couldn't help thinking of a slightly more abstracted version of the horse problem: Using the same reasoning , if you want to find the top three out of n^2 horses, but can only race them n at a time, then the minimum number of races required will...

Haha, amusing timing (and I agree that consistency is nice). It probably helps to have two versions of the same argument given how hard it is to express clearly, though I suspect your formulation is more easily understood.

A method that is similar, but faster, than those that have so far been provided: 1) Start with five races [Cumulative total races (CT) = 5], with racing groups labelled G1 through to G5 2) Eliminate the bottom two from every race (since they cannot be in the top three) leaving 15 horses...

Nah, assuming that the horses run constant times Boganboy's method for finding the fastest horse appears to be correct (since, as he said, it will necessarily win every race it is in --> thus his A1-5 race may not have the five fastest horses, but it will necessarily have the fastest horse...

What about Sodom and Gomorrah? (not to mention The Flood) I realise that god was killing sinners, but it's still pretty brutal. That's not a club that I want to join.

Logic saves. It warms the heart to see positions swayed by its mighty hand. Kudos.

Fair enough, but note well that the same argument also extends to the lemur's son. If you can argue from what you view to be evidence then that is fine.

But, when it comes to the existence of god the burden of proof rests with you. The simple argument (quoted from a post a few pages back) goes as follows: It can be strongly argued that burden of proof lies on the individual trying to prove the existence of an entity. If it were the other way...

Not quite, because you can count on having multiple people entering with a UAI of 99.5 (the generous reading of my post would be to take '>' as greater than or equal to - lazy notation I know - in which case the statement will generally be correct with a median of 99.5). I'm not sure if...

For UNSW medicine both the median and mean UAIs for entry are 99+ from year to year. I am led to believe that they tend to be similar and often fall around 99.5 such that the majority of candidates making it into UNSW medicine have UAIs > 99.5. A stellar UMAT score can get you in with a...

Apparently so :( (see study)

And so in reply I provided a simple but strong argument which must be defeated before such a shift can take place. Say hello to the lemur for me (Frank is his name).

No, I think it can be strongly argued that burden of proof lies on the individual trying to prove the existence of an entity. If it were the other way around then burden of proof would require us to believe in all entities whose existence cannot be disproven, starting with the invisible...

Down with liberal programs of study!