The story is about a technologically advanced robot that guards a treasure of great value. To survive the encounter and be allowed to pass, one has to answer a number of questions. Some guy attempts to cheat by using a search tech to find the answers as they are asked (Internet). The guy answers all the questions until the end. The last question is less about search-able knowledge and more philosophical in nature. He fails to answer and is obliterated. I remember it was in one of those Fantasy and Sci-fi pulp books. I used to buy them at used book stores when I was a kid.
There was a great SF story I read some time ago (probably 25+ years ago) where there was a well known treasure trove, guarded by a killer robot that would ask all comers a series of difficult questions from all areas (math, physics, literature, history, etc.)  But everyone eventually failed and died... until the last person managed to make it past the robot:     By just answering gibberish to the robot.  Unfortunately, after collecting a ton of treasure, the robot casually asked him why he wanted it, he answered in a sensible way (something like "because it's valuable"), and the robot killed him, because he failed the final test.   Any ideas who wrote this?  What it was titled?
How to get a random value from dictionary? how many terms will there be once you collect terms with equal monomials? What is the sum of all the coefficients? Calculate time elapsed in php - spans over 24 hours Acro package provides "! Missing number, treated as zero." after update to acro-v2.7b Can some metadata about deleted posts be included in Data.SE? I like to use  to view usage stats for some of the sites, however deleted posts are not included on Data.SE and I think this skews the numbers quite a bit, particularly on sites with a lot of deletions. Would it be possible to include some limited data about deleted posts in Data.SE to make statistical queries more accurate? You could clear the non-public data fields of deleted posts, such as Posts.Title, Posts.Body, and Posts.OwnerUserId to address privacy concerns explained . You could even leave the PostId set to 0 since I know SE doesn't want to provide users with a way of searching deleted questions. The data I would mostly be interested in is CreationDate, LastActivityDate, PostHistory (date closed, date reopened, date deleted, etc), and the fact there was a deleted question in the first place. Up/Down votes, Score, Tags, and View/Answer/Favorite count would also be preferred. This would make the statistical queries accurate, while still removing the information not meant to be visible to the public. How do you run as a different user from the Start Menu in Windows 10? Running an application as a different user (e.g. domain admin account) from the start menu (by shift + right-clicking the application) used to be an option in Windows 7 &amp; XP.  However, I can't find that option in Windows 10. The workaround seems to be either 1) to find the application in Windows Explorer (shift + right-click) or 2) use runas.exe from the command line.  However, in order to use those workarounds, I have look up the executable name first. It's a bit difficult because I don't have the name of every RSAT tool or executable name memorized.  (e.g. "Active Directory Users and Computers" is dsa.msc, "Routing and Remote Acces" is rrasmgmt.msc)  Is there a simpler way to do this? Change owner of internal hard drive partition from root to user I have a number of drives internal and external. Some are partitioned. Most mount automatically at boot (all did at one point).    One partition is owned by root and therefore does not mount automatically. I know how to mount it as root.   I do not know how to take ownership of that partition as user X. I have tried changing permissions using the gui in Nautilus as root. They are not accepted and immediately revert.  The partition is NTFS. The other parition on that drive is owned by me as user and mounts automatically Categorical Quotient and group actions I am trying to practice calculating categorical quotients and I ran into this example. I am unable to get the answer and was wondering if someone can help?  Let $G = Z/3Z =$ $\{1, \omega, \omega^2\}$, where $\omega$ is a cube root of unity. Let $G$ act on $𝔸^{2}$ via $\omega(x, y) = (\omega x, \omega y)$. Find the categorical quotient of $𝔸^{2}$ by G. I noticed a peculiar behavior of my Ubuntu 13.04 (although possibly it's also present in previous versions): when my system freezes completely (I do not ask for troubleshooting this) so that even X does not respond to Ctrl+Alt+FX keys, the CapsLock toggle diode on my keyboard blinks (with frequency of ~1Hz), although the system is completely unresponsive.   What is the cause of this phenomena? Is it caused by some internal kernel mechanisms? Is this specific to Ubuntu (is it caused some custom Ubuntu additional software)? Does it has anything to do with HAL? What is the purpose of it? Can I customize this behavior on Ubuntu? Why does a light beam in a moving light clock follows a V shaped path? If I am standing on a platform moving along the X-axis and I throw a basketball vertically upward along the z-axis, the ball also travels along the x-axis. Does the same apply to a photon? According to a special relativity postulate  speed of light is not affected by the velocity of the inertial frame or the velocity of the emitter. If this postulate is true, shouldn't a photon fired vertically as above should travel only along the z-axis but not along the x-axis? Why is it dangerous to eat meat which has been left out and then cooked? I want to try to convert a string to a Guid, but I don't want to rely on catching exceptions (   for performance reasons - exceptions are expensive for usability reasons - the debugger pops up  for design reasons - the expected is not exceptional   In other words the code:  public static Boolean TryStrToGuid(String s, out Guid value) {     try     {         value = new Guid(s);         return true;     }     catch (FormatException)     {         value = Guid.Empty;         return false;     } }   is not suitable.  I would try using RegEx, but since the guid can be parenthesis wrapped, brace wrapped, none wrapped, makes it hard.   Additionally, I thought certain Guid values are invalid(?)    Update 1   had a good idea to catch only FormatException, rather than all. Changed the question's code sample to include suggestion.    Update 2  Why worry about thrown exceptions? Am I really expecting invalid GUIDs all that often?   The answer is yes. That is why I am using TryStrToGuid - I am expecting bad data.  Example 1 . I might be parsing folder names, checking to see if the text after the final . is a GUID.  c:\Program Files c:\Program Files.old c:\Users c:\Users.old c:\UserManager.{CE7F5AA5-6832-43FE-BAE1-80D14CD8F666} c:\Windows c:\Windows.old   Example 2 I might be running a heavily used web-server wants to check the validity of some posted back data. I don't want invalid data tying up resources 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than it needs to be.  Example 3 I might be parsing a search expression entered by a user.     If they enter GUID's I want to process them specially (such as specifically searching for that object, or highlight and format that specific search term in the response text.)    Update 3 - Performance benchmarks  Test converting 10,000 good Guids, and 10,000 bad Guids.  Catch FormatException:    10,000 good:     63,668 ticks    10,000 bad:   6,435,609 ticks  Regex Pre-Screen with try-catch:    10,000 good:    637,633 ticks    10,000 bad:     717,894 ticks  COM Interop CLSIDFromString    10,000 good:    126,120 ticks    10,000 bad:      23,134 ticks   p.s. I shouldn't have to justify a question. I want to write a function that takes an array of letters as an argument and a number of those letters to select.   Say you provide an array of 8 letters and want to select 3 letters from that. Then you should get:  8! / ((8 - 3)! * 3!) = 56   Arrays (or words) in return consisting of 3 letters each. Large braces for specifying values of variables by condition How do I produce a conditional expression with large brackets? For example: X = 0 if a=1, 1 otherwise, with a large left bracket and specifying each condition in a line? How can I translate CMYK to Pantone colors? In particular, how do I translate CMYK 90C 85M 80Y 63K to a Pantone color? Number of normal subgroups of a non abelian group of order $21$... CSIR December $2013$ Question is to :  Find the number of Normal subgroups of a nonabelian group $G$ of order $21$ other than $\{e\}$ and $G$.  What I have done so far is :  As $|G|=21=3\cdot7$  we have :  No. of sylow $3$ subgroups $1+3k$ dividing $7$ leaving out possibilities $1$ or $7$  No. of sylow $7$ subgroups $1+7k$ dividing $3$ leaving out only possibilities $1$.  So, we have a unique sylow $7$ subgroup and so it is normal.  I remember somehow that any normal group should come from a normal sylow subgroup or something like that.  S0, I prefer to conclude there is only one Normal subgroup for a non abelian group of order $21$.  Please let me know if this is true and please help me to fill that gap :      I remember somehow that any normal group should come from a normal sylow subgroup or something like that.   Thank you. C non-blocking keyboard input I'm trying to write a program in C (on Linux) that loops until the user presses a key, but shouldn't require a keypress to continue each loop.  Is there a simple way to do this? I figure I could possibly do it with select() but that seems like a lot of work.  Alternatively, is there a way to catch a ctrl-c keypress to do cleanup before the program closes instead of non-blocking io? Right now  is fairly broken -- it's a simple descending sort by views. As Joel said , it is &quot;a self-fulfilling prophecy.&quot; But this is not intentional, it's only because we haven't had time to improve it yet! As I sit down to write a better algorithm, I thought you guys might have some insight into what would make a good formula to determine the &quot;hot&quot; questions -- over the last 24 hours, the last week, the last month, and all time. Here are the variables we have to work with:  Votes [aka Score] Views Answers Answer Votes [aka Score] Whether the question has an accepted answer or not Time question was originally asked Time of last activity on question Reputation of asker Reputation(s) of answerers  Joel cited the reddit formula as an example, but I think our site is a little different than just a basic link submission site. Plus, we have more variables and data to work with. I found a  describing a few formulas: Y Combinator Hacker News  (p - 1) / (t + 2)^1.5 p = votes (points) from users t = time since submission in hours  Reddit  t = (time of entry post) - (Dec 8, 2005) x = upvotes - downvotes y = {1 if x &gt; 0, 0 if x = 0, -1 if x &lt; 0) z = {1 if x &lt; 0, otherwise x} log(z) + (y * t)/45000  Thoughts? Ideas? I don't want to overthink this; I just want the &quot;hot&quot; questions to be relevant and useful to us. So the simpler the algorithm the better! Based on my analysis of the above and the comments so far, here's the second version of what I have implemented so far. This might suck. I don't know:  (log(Qviews)*4) + ((Qanswers * Qscore)/5) + sum(Ascores) -------------------------------------------------------- ((QageInHours+1) - ((QageInHours - Qupdated)/2)) ^ 1.5  Note that accepted answers weight not at all in hotness. This is intentional, as I feel accepted answers are a fine social contract, but not a good data point for question or answer quality. This algorithm will heavily favor questions with LOTS of answers, as the sum(Ascores) are now included -- one assumes if there are lots of answers, there will be a lot more voting on the answers, too. Update: Note that this formula is what is used on the  linked from the homepage of each site. It is not the formula used to determine the  list. See . Height and minimal number of generators of an ideal How can I determine the height and the least number of generators of the ideal $ I=(xz-y^2,x^3-yz,z^2-x^2y) \subset K[x,y,z] $?      I tried to calculate the dimension of the vector space $I/I\mathfrak m$ with $\mathfrak m=(x,y,z)$, but I'm not able to find it.  I think the height is $2$, because the affine variety should be a curve, and also I know that the ideal is prime, so I need a chain $0\subset \mathfrak p \subset I$. Maybe $(xz-y^2)?$ Is it prime? Color change of string delimiter in listings with macro