this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
784 points (97.8% liked)
memes
15012 readers
3685 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Ok but like how do you know it's 1/3 of the apple without any other tools.
Let’s not go too deep on this alright
Right... right... but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Envy-free_cake-cutting
I did not expect to see this today
To put that in perspective, for 2 people that would be ~4.3 billion
alright we better get started then
It's just the upper bound. I have no idea what the process is lol.
well you can't rule out the worst possible case, so lets get rolling
Consider a spherical cow perched above a black hole, facing the sunset....
Cut first, choose last. It's as fair as you can get when eyeballing it
Only works with two people. For three you use Selfridge-Conway procedure which uses up to five cuts.
What's funny is that you've actually stumbled onto an entire problem that's studied quite heavily. I remembered a Numberphile video about this. The problem is called "envy-free cake splitting". It's pretty straightforward. A split is envy-free if no one believes someone else got more than them. For three people this was figured out in 1960 and you can read about it here. It has been solved for N participants as well and you can read about the general problem here.
For two people, it's obvious. One splits and one chooses. The first person is incentivized to make it even because they don't know which they'll get.
I was going to give a summary of the process for three people but it's too much to explain succinctly. Just check the article I posted lol.
How is it obvious for two people, what if I have horrible manual dexterity and despite my best efforts, I slice the cake like 1/3 and 2/3, and the other person picks the bigger piece? I would very much envy the other piece
Your "cut" would not be complete until you believe you've made them 50/50.
here we go infinite cuts
Then have them cut and you choose. Easy. Now they envy your piece and having better dexterity as well.
Insert Thanos balanced meme here.
it is a magical long sword of apple slicing (+5 damage and THAC0 against apples, +1 otherwise)
You don't, you only know it's possible to do so thanks to the Ham sandwich theorem