I took the trouble to transcribe it:
"We're all trying to gauge not only what is best for our individual game but what is every other individual thinking is best for their game, and that's just I don't even know what factorial that is, but 13 to the 12th? — like that's just so many different permutations of people working together and thinking different things."
That was said by the cast-member Jeanine Zheng at tribal council, so, in front of all the other contestants, whose faces read to me as though they were thinking things like "Factorial?! I was told there would be no math" and "Too smart, she's got to go."
Anyway... Zheng is 24-year-old UX designer. I had to look up "UX."
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36 comments:
"Too smart, she's got to go."
Not really. She wanted to be on TV.
Um... 13 to the 12th isn't a factorial.
I noticed that. The word "permutations" would have been much more appropriate and would have been less annoying.
There's an underappreciated facet of conspiracy theory--where people's interests are the same, you don't need coordination to get actions that look coordinated.
Zheng overstates the problem. While you have to allow for the uniqueness of personality, everyone there has a shared motivation ("I want to win by getting everyone else voted off"). There are not 13 factorial permutations. There's only a handful.
UX - User eXerpience. So they design crappy websites.
And, you don't generally raise factorials to powers (factorial's growth rate is faster than any exponential function.
12! = 479,001,600
Permutations of 12 is probably not what they mean, anyway. For permutations order matters, e.g, ab and ba are different permutations. They probably mean combinations. Which is a smaller number, e.g., ab and ba are counted as the 'same' combination, though still big enough.
13 to the 12th is not a factorial.
I bailed on Survivor a while ago. It became too formulaic. I hated the calculating and plotting and all the gimmicks. It's like watching the Price is Right with the challenges. "Oooh! Plinko is my favorite!"
"I'm a survivor!"
"I'm a survivor!"
https://youtu.be/0KqDHFYcel8
From the transcript, she is using "factorial" wrong, but she is using permutations correctly.
James @ 10:02 and Madison Man @ 10:19: At the risk of piling on, yes. 13 to the 12th is gibberish in this context. Try! Learning! How! Factorials! Work!
TRISTRAM,
Order does matter here- as a strategy one wants their enemies voted off first, not the allies, and one's self not voted off at all.
UI dev's build the interface.
UX dev's make the interface usable and enjoyable. Or don't...
Most UX dev's are coders same way that most teachers and journalists are failures at whatever they are teaching or writing about. They can't write good code so they end up in this weird role of telling people who can code how to make things look and work.
Some UX devs are very good. But the selection process for them is flawed because you tend to just end up with the bottom quintile of coders. Kinda like "front end" developers who turn to wix.
This may have changed lately as companies figured this issue out.
Once you learn factorials you never buy a lotto ticket again.
She didn't save her BFF with her immunity idol. Now folks will know she's not a loyal alliance player. I like how everyone underestimates the intelligence the old white dude who looks like an aging hippie... Yet he precipitated the elimination of the manipulative psychologist.
Butkus51 said...Once you learn factorials you never buy a lotto ticket again.
The brilliance of lotteries, from a marketing standpoint is, somebody's going to win. It doesn't matter how long the longshot is, somebody's going to win. It's a million to one, it's 10 million to one, it's 30 shark attacks in a bathtub. Doesn't matter. Somebody's going to win.
What happens to the math if a couple of ttrouples spring up?
What she’s driving at is the Nash equilibrium — your optimal strategy given that everyone else is calculating their optimal strategy (under the same assumption that you and everyone else is calculating their optimal strategy). John Nash’s proof that anequilibrium must exist was his doctoral dissertation (12 pages typed, double spaced) and also his Nobel Prize (in economics) which was awarded despite the fact that by then he was suffering from severe schizophrenia.
That a Nash equilibrium exists doesn’t mean that it is easy to compute. But at any rate 13 factorial (written 13! ) is not the same as 13 raised to the 12th power.
13 factorial =6,227,020,800
13 raised to the 12th power =23,298,085,122,481
It doesn't matter how long the longshot is, somebody's going to win. It's a million to one, it's 10 million to one
Well, then how do jackpots roll over and increase? In any one game (or week) it's not only possible but likely that NOBODY wins -- that week. So the player has to buy another ticket for the next week.
She stated it as a power which would have produced over 23 trillion combinations (permutations) of what everyone in the group thinks is best for their game. But that's not a particularly relevant number if you are looking to the end game since over time, the number in the group is reduced.
She might certainly have meant factorials as a way to count the number of derangements (a term used in combinatorial math) of a set number of people such that no combination of votes, as those people are sequentially eliminated, results in her being voted out leaving her as the last person standing. Another way to look at it is to imagine 12 kids in a preschool class putting their backpacks on the shelf. What would be the number of ways those backpacks could be returned to those children so than no child receives their own backpack at the end of the day? That would be the process of counting the number of derangements of the 12 (n!=12) backpacks. The very next combination of returns would result in every kid getting their own backpack leaving her as if she was a 13th kid who did not bring a backpack.
Out of 479 million plus permutations (12!), the number of subfactorial derangements is around 126 million. She had to add an additional player (the 13th) in order to survive the order of derangements since, by definition in this area of math, 0!=1.
i believe she actually meant factorial since that is what makes the most sense from her standpoint.
- Krumhorn
""Too smart, she's got to go."/Not really. She wanted to be on TV."
I'm imagining what the other contestants were thinking. They will see her as dangerous because she seems smarter than they are. It's a process of elimination, so they vote out the ones they're afraid will outsmart them or trick them in various ways.
But I don't think it's un-smart to want to go on "Survivor." Why would you think that?
Of course, we can also count the number of derangements of a 3-man throuple and a small dog on a queen bed, but that's not quite the same sort of math. It's a Foucault multiplication of perversions.
- Krumhorn
You had to look up UX?
How about UI?
I was a UX/UI designer for a bit...
Factorial is nonsense in the given context.
First it was MMI (man-machine interface). But that’s sexist, so it became HMI (human machine interface). Then UI (user interface as people have noted). But that really didn’t tall the story of what you do for a living, and it hurt your feelings, so they called it UX. And it’s been a slow decline of user experience since then.
J Melcher said...
It doesn't matter how long the longshot is, somebody's going to win. It's a million to one, it's 10 million to one
Well, then how do jackpots roll over and increase? In any one game (or week) it's not only possible but likely that NOBODY wins -- that week. So the player has to buy another ticket for the next week.
10/28/22, 12:36 PM
And that’s the brilliance of lotteries!
What’s power ball at right now? 800 million? That’s around 200million. Cash. A lot of smart people who know the odds are going to be buying lottery tickets…if you don’t play, you will never win.
"...but 13 to the 12th?"
13! = 13*12*11...*4*3*2, so that's going to be a lot smaller than 13*13 twelve times.
Not actually all that smart, should have stayed.
I came for the math, but I'm staying for the UX!
Remember the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation?
" The satisfaction you get, from getting it to work, makes you forget the uselessness of the device. In other words, the superficial design flaws completely conceal the fundamental design flaws. "
Companies pay UX folks to either avoid this problem, or to not, depending.
… if you don’t play, you will never win
And if you don’t play you also never lose.
"But I don't think it's un-smart to want to go on "Survivor." Why would you think that?"
Because all the smart people have moved to youtube.
Joe Smith said...
You had to look up UX?
How about UI?
**********
that's easy: it's one of Feder Federson's noms de nonsense.
Arturo Ui, to be exact.
Joe Smith said...
You had to look up UX?
>>>>>being a law prof she probably thought of "ux" in the phrase "et ux." It appears in old real property case names, and is an abbreviation for "et uxor" , "and wife".
How about UI?
**********
>>>>>That's easy: it's one of Feder Federson's noms de nitwittery
>>>>>Arturo Ui, to be exact.
>>From the transcript, she is using "factorial" wrong, but she is using permutations correctly.
13 to the 12th is complete nonsense here, but you need factorials to do permutations (or combinations).
--gpm
So the link is to a pre-competition interview, and she answers, "what do you think people will perceive you as?" with "I am Asian and will probably be perceived as intellectual and strategic. So trying to make sure I combat that a little bit going in, I think, is important." I guess in the pressure of the moment she forgot.
Big Mike said...
… if you don’t play, you will never win
And if you don’t play you also never lose.
10/28/22, 5:46 PM
And lo, we gathered around the shining light of the computer monitor Sunday morning to check the lottery numbers. Those were sad times, indeed.
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