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Lasty wrote:To be fair, he might not be any one of those things, since he's also a pathological liar. :p

He tells the best lies. Just great. Really. A lot of people are saying it.

All resists are useless yo!

I just wish the diagonal argument cranks would turn the page in their 'introduction to set theory' book and read the proof that no set can be in bijection with its powerset.

An infinitesimally small number would be the difference between 0.333333333333 repeating * 3 vs 1/3*3. In other words, 1 - 0.9999999 repeating. It's equivalent to 0, clearly, but equally clearly it's not quite the same. The difference between those two numbers is 0.0000 repeating, followed by 1. Th...

Arrhythmia wrote:
Hands wrote:An ultrafinitist weighs in.

finitists are also lunatics, though.

They certainly like making things harder for themselves. I think the extent to which you can do mathematics with finitist methods is interesting though.

An ultrafinitist weighs in.

Irrational numbers can represent quantities just fine though. You could have a jug with pi liters of water (or maybe some other less-popular irrational number that doesn't have its own symbol), mix in 5 grams of salt, then the amount of salt per liter is 5/pi grams. e: although I guess you could ar...

Shtopit wrote:Gnolls porn

That's why Yiuf spends so much time in the shed.

Going way back to the start of the thread about why you can't divide by zero, I usually explain division (to small children or internet commentators, two groups which share a lot of similarities) as splitting something into groups. You have 10 M+M's (everyone loves candy), and have two children. Th...

I think in general trying to cobble together a real understanding of science and math from pop-science articles is a recipe for confusion. There's a reason people study full time for like 10 years before they get to a point where they can engage with the current level of knowledge on even a small pa...

Late game is much easier because a) you have lots of consumables and evocables, and b) the rate your health goes down is much slower. In the early game you often find yourself in a tricky situation with no obvious way to escape, and many run of the mill monsters can easily kill you in 2 hits. Findin...

Why do mirrors flip us left/right but not up/down?

Meta-observation:. I've TAed a bunch of math, and my biggest takeaway is that when you're confused, it is very important to ask yourself "what do these words even mean?" The reason people don't do this, and aren't taught to do this, is that the answer is often very difficult! Real numbers...

Sprucery wrote:Well, once you get enough of them, you can pay your next purchase with them.

Yes, optimal play demands that I keep them because once every few months it's convenient for me to gather a handful of them and carry them to the shop to buy myself a small chocolate bar

The shop at my work has products priced with half and quarter units of currency rather than full units. This means I often get change that includes annoying and largely unusable small denomination coins. I'd much rather they just put their prices up so everything was in full units. Obviously I could...

Anyway, you've made some excellent points, but they still highlight that ∞ works the way it does because decided-upon matters have dictated it and not because mathematicians pursue the truth in earnest. I think your dissatisfaction stems simply from a confusion about how math works. If you ask &quo...

stickyfingers wrote:
Hands wrote:Getting spectral weapon online, for example, as Sk is probably worth your while once you get to the mid-game.

Getting spectral weapon online is worth your while once you get to D:3. D:2 if polearms.

Not if you want to win consistently.

The problem with AM, Sk, Wr is that the starting books don't directly kill things, so you have to train melee or ranged. And if you're killing stuff with melee/ranged the easiest way you can increase your defences is by wearing heavier armour. And wearing heavier armour reduces or removes your abili...

duvessa wrote:to make it easiest to win this one: kiku or fedhas
to make it hardest to win this one: chei/xom/qazlal

the rest of the gods won't affect the difficulty of winning this one by much

Going Trog is also probably a bad idea at this point.

That's when you quaff your potion of magic, or use one of your non-mp dependent escape options. If this isn't enough then either the RNG is seriously out to get you or you screwed up a long time ago.

I also think guardian spirit is pretty good on almost all characters. It's probably my favourite regular amulet.

Actually you're right, they're not literally laws. Robot decision-making is described as a set of competing potentials in their brains, and that the three laws are just a way to describe how the decision-making works. And in the meta sense, it's just a literary device. If you think about it, the 3 ...

The main problem is that it's impossible not to let people suffer due to inaction. You don't have to contrive a situation for the problem to arise. Or perhaps you're reading the laws too literally. I would recommend reading a few of Asimov's robot short stories. There's a few about breaking the 3 l...

You're savaging these felids. You're going to have to handicap yourself to make it fair.

tstbtto: tell me more I love this line. Classic Eliza! :D Re: Asimov's First Law and the trolley problem. In Asimov's stories, a robot unable to fulfill the First Law would generally become catatonic. There's an exception though, i.e. robots who are smart/sophisticated enough to accept the Zeroth L...

duvessa wrote:
Hands wrote:The problem with Asimov's laws is that the first one is impossible.
Do you have the slightest idea what Asimov's books were about?

Ok, my memory is a little fuzzy but I believe he specialized in coming of age tales centered around the Bay Area surf scene of the 1970s.

You don't need amazing resists to do extended. Fewer resists just means that more concentration is occasionally required. The only danger you're in from low MR at this point is paralysis. And yes, it's potentially nasty but you can limit your exposure with careful positioning, and in any case the ch...

what does it mean to "bot draconians"? bot which is programmed to play only draconians maybe? anyway all bots should be programmed to follow Isaac Asimov's laws of robotisc: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey t...

Btw, if you start as CK and then abandon Xom, does it still count as CK game for <greatspecies> purpose? What's the fun in that? MiCK sounds fun as hell It's not. You mainly just have to reset fights more often, rest more often (and in less convenient places), and escape the abyss more often. And o...

jwoodward48ss wrote:Well, that's optimal, but some people find that micromanaging skills isn't fun, so they train three or so skills at a time, focusing, if needed, on one.

OP was training 7 skills, and focusing 2.

I do not have a DD character, I am just wondering how I would play one. Also, I think that box of beasts/spider sack are only really good for creating a one turn barrier between a monster and you during the orb run, as the summons do not deal enough damage/have enough health to stand up to enemies ...

Are you talking just about felids or other races too? It might sound silly but i think felids are more streakable than humans because they can just run away from a stereotypical 10 speed tough melee dude. Felid move speed is very strong but isn't this balanced in the very early game by the fact tha...

And the streak continues. Impressive. One question, how do you avoid dying occasionally in the very early game (before extra lives kick in)? This is the major thing that stops me stringing long streaks together. For felids in particular, i exclude hobgoblins/kobolds with weapons on D:1 until i'm le...

As a spriggan you need to be very careful around enemies with attacks you can't evade such as fireball or hellf.. um, damnation. Also, I would train fighting more and wear something with spirit shield if available. Hat of the alchemist was probably a bad choice on this character too. You could have ...

And the streak continues. Impressive. One question, how do you avoid dying occasionally in the very early game (before extra lives kick in)? This is the major thing that stops me stringing long streaks together.

Flying also significantly reduces shatter damage.

Why weren't you flying? And why were you wearing an amulet of harm? You were just asking to be shattered to death here.

Also, it's better not to train so many skills at once.

You guys are so pro. Hey, I'm agreeing with you as far as I can tell. On topic: I don't think shoals needs to be nerfed. You don't need special equipment or spells (though the right equipment can make it fairly straightforward), you just need to take it slowly, and to recognise when a situation is ...

You don't have to kill all the dudes. Just skip the level.

You can win all races and backgrounds etc. offline, but then lack of verifiability will deny you the adulation you crave. Driven to despair you will end your life, dishevelled, urine soaked and alone, at 3am in the car park of a cut price eatery. When they find your body they'll say "It was onl...

I don't blame you. The one or two times I tried to mess with Xom, I just died without even seeing Lair, so yeah. I say lots of congrats in order just for being able to put up with it through to when you did! Thanks. Careful play with Xom is pretty boring. Just small things like every time he mutate...

Queen Cassie wrote:Congrats! Seems like you had a lot of nice luck, after the first couple times. (Killer bees are the worst.) Didn't feel like taking one step into extended?

I find extended a bit tedious to be honest. Also I wanted to win with Xom and I didn't really fancy dealing with his bullshit in panhelltomb.

Significant (for me at least) as with this win I've now won every race and background. This one took a few tries. First time I ran into a pack of killer bees on D3. A challenge at the best of times and one that on this occasion I wasn't up to. 2nd try Xom confused me then summoned a cloud of poison ...

If you mean that when everything is a cake walk i agree, otherwise have fun doing snake pit without rf/relec/mr. I've done snake very often without rF or rElec. I don't even check if I have them when I'm going into Snake. MR also does not matter in Snake especially. Getting teleported in Snake is p...

At any given down-stair you don't know the up-stair that lies on the minimal path (unless there's an interface feature I don't know about, which is quite possible). Press X. (Has to be uppercase, lowercase x will not work) Hover over an upwards staircase. Press [ The game will now display the map o...

I think slow, methodical killdudzing is the safest strategy for most characters for most of the 3-rune game. At any rate I don't see how it's possible for any other approach to be strictly safer.

Autotravel finds the optimal route to the exit. Personally, after I pick up the Orb and teleport away, I set the exit from D:1 as the autotravel target and then just use ctrl-g to go there after every interruption on the way. It is also useful to use all upward hatches during the game so that autot...

No, you don't get a shorter route than digging while on the orbrun, which is obviously what I was saying. You cannot actually plan an entire orbrun route, unless you intend to fight every monster you can't just walk away from. Did you actually read my original post? Yes, I did. Yes, you cannot know...

You won't get the quickest route just by looking on the map and cutting a route to the nearest staircase anyway. At any given down-stair you don't know the up-stair that lies on the minimal path (unless there's an interface feature I don't know about, which is quite possible). Accounting for potenti...

I don't think pre-digging the orb run is optimal. I think the benefit is so marginal that it is outweighed by other small factors like piety loss and use of recharging. I did pre-dig the orb run for my first few wins. And I enjoyed doing it too because it felt like I was meticulously preparing for s...

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