Lambdia

Foundations & Logic

13 articles

The Strike Quietly Absorbed a Square Root

A call whose payoff is the square of the stock minus 100 does not start paying at 100, it starts paying at 10, because the square clears the strike exactly when the stock clears its square root. Placing the kink at the written strike prices the option at essentially zero on a stock at 12, when its real value is 53.8168. The closed form is ordinary Black-Scholes on the transformed asset with a growth term of 4 percent and a strike leg that still discounts at the riskless rate, and the value curve sits above intrinsic everywhere while being shallower than it at the spot in question.

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Twelve Marbles, Three Weighings, and Twenty-Seven Ways to Land

Twenty-four possible answers against 3^3 = 27 outcome sequences leaves just enough room, and four against four splits those answers into exactly 8, 8 and 8. Six against six always tips, so it wastes the level outcome and leaves twelve answers for nine remaining sequences, which makes halving impossible rather than merely slow. The counting argument bounds outcome sequences rather than strategies, so it rules out every adaptive continuation at once, and the explicit schedule closes the positive half.

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The Announcement That Told Nobody Anything

A stranger says out loud what every islander can already see, and ten days later ten people leave. The fact was mutual knowledge all along; what the announcement supplied was the nine levels of nested knowledge above it. An explicit count over 4096 possible worlds settles the induction without trusting it.

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Foundations & LogicLycéeExplication11 min

Blue, and the Two Sentences That Contain No Answer

Of the eight colour triples, seven are feasible from a pool of three blue hats and two red. The first silence removes one, the second removes two more, and all four survivors put a blue hat on the third man, which is what makes his answer a deduction rather than a lucky call. A pool sweep shows three blue and two red is the only small pool where the story can happen.

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64 Rings, and 584 Billion Years at One Move a Second

Thirty-two rings really do take 136 years at a move a second, which is what makes doubling it to 272 so tempting. The exact ratio between the two cases factors as two to the thirty-two plus one, so the guess is short by more than four billion times. The article carries the lower bound the recursion alone does not give, and the 2-adic rule for which ring moves when.

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One Gold Bar, Two Cuts, Seven Evenings: 1, 2 and 4

Seven pieces cost six cuts and the schedule pays correctly, so the six-cut answer breaks one constraint and nothing else. Because the worker can hand pieces back, the contract is on his holding rather than on the transfer, and the ledger turns out to be a three-bit counter. Brute force finds 1-2-4 is the only three-piece solution.

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23 personnes suffisent pour un anniversaire commun, et 253 paires l'expliquent

La réponse réflexe tourne autour de 180, la moitié du calendrier. Le vrai seuil est 23, parce qu'une coïncidence demande une paire et que 23 personnes en portent 253. Le même raisonnement met la question « quelqu'un partage-t-il MON anniversaire » à 253 personnes, onze fois plus de monde, et le seuil en racine carrée derrière les deux explique qu'un identifiant aléatoire de 64 bits se répète après cinq milliards de tirages et non dix-huit trillions.

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