[OT] Destroying all human life on Earth AT THE SAME TIME

[John Reimer]

Hello Gregor,

> John Reimer wrote:
> 
>> Hello Gregor,
>> 
>>> You want to destroy all life on Earth. However, you don't want
>>> people panicking as this could alter the result, so you want all
>>> humans to die at the same instant. To do this, you're creating
>>> nano-robots. A single nano-robot cannot control a persons mind:
>>> Seven are required (three in each half of the brain and one in the
>>> brain stem). Nano-robots can harvest material from their host to
>>> build new nano-robots, but the host will die after approximately
>>> twenty nano-robots-worth of material has been harvested (they
>>> require particular rare particles that can only be harvested from
>>> the heart and lungs). Nano-robots may communicate with one-another
>>> via broadcast, but the range is limited to 1 mile. Nano-robots do
>>> not have unique identification globally, but do have unique
>>> identification within a body (that is, nano-robots in the same body
>>> can distinguish each other, but broadcast messages from a nano-robot
>>> in one human cannot implicitly be distinguished from broadcasts from
>>> another). These broadcasts travel at the speed of light (seeing as
>>> that they are light). Nano-robots harvest energy from their host,
>>> and as such can survive indefinitely. A nano-robot in a dead host
>>> survives long enough that this variable is not relevant for this
>>> problem.
>>> 
>>> Robots can only be spread by direct physical contact from an
>>> infected host to an uninfected one, and the process of transferring
>>> one nano-robot destroys two nano-robots (that is, the infected host
>>> loses three robots in the process but the new host only gains one).
>>> 
>>> Devise an algorithm for these nano-robots that will destroy all
>>> human life on Earth in a minimum amount of time, but with which all
>>> humans will be destroyed within five minutes of each other. That is,
>>> minimize the time from deploying the first nano-robot to the initial
>>> human life being exterminated, and minimize the time from the
>>> initial human life being exterminated to all human life being
>>> exterminated. You may assume a maximum of twelve degrees of
>>> separation between average industrialized people and that even the
>>> most remote tribe is connected by at least one human to the
>>> industrialized world.
>>> 
>>> Bonus: How would you change this algorithm if you wanted to destroy
>>> all animal life? All life? How would you change it if astronauts
>>> were considered?
>>> 
>>> - Gregor Richards
>>> 
>> Ok, Gregor.  I'll bite.  What's your fascination with this problem?
>> Are you trying to make a point about something?
>> 
>> If "yes", you may as well be direct about it.  If "no", then why the
>> thread hijacking?  Come on... help me out... I'm a little slow
>> sometimes. :)
>> -JJR
> Thread hijacking? Seriously? This isn't a forum, there are totally
> disconnected subthreads within any thread.
> 


Or whatever... thread "detracting" perhaps is a better term. 


> This is what we call a "joke". On the one hand it's a parody of the
> always-annoying real-life-algorithm thread, on the other hand it's a
> parody of the needlessly-loaded choice of settings for the
> oh-didn't-I-mention-it's-always-annoying real-life-algorithm. This
> problem could be formalized as a simple tree-based message-passing
> communication problem, but instead we've gone political. Well, so long
> as war is involved, let's step it up and destroy everything. Yeeee
> haw.
> 
> - Gregor Richards
> 


Ok, that's better.  Thanks for clarifying.  Actually, I didn't find it near 
as annoying as you did, but I do agree that it was getting a little too close 
to a political tune on something that is very likely a touchy subject... 
good call.

-JJR