Best comment yesterday came from Manuel:
Turing did not know how to train a machine to pass the Turing test. I’m sure Oprah knows how train a person to pass the Oprah test.
But there is no Oprah test. So Turing will advance.
Maybe next time we do this competition we can include Alison Bechdel.
And today we have an unseeded GOAT vs. the second-seeded mathematician. I’m pretty sure that neither would give a seminar half as fun as Oprah or Turing, but one of the two must advance to the third round. Who should it be?
Again, here’s the bracket and here are the rules.
We’ve not thought at all about language. I think modern Portuguese might do better in Columbia’s neighborhood than classic French. Laplace would write equations in a universal language but Pele could show us stuff that didn’t require words.
(I started out expecting the language argument to favor Pele, convinced myself otherwise, then convinced myself back.)
Pele vs Laplace — I’d go to a seminar by either, although I think I’d probably find Laplace more interesting…but this is such a lame comment that I don’t expect it to carry any weight at all in this contest.
But I did want to second your implicit suggestion that, in some future bracket — ten years from now, I hope, since I share the sentiment, expressed by some, that this just seems interminable and I’m not excited about seeing these brackets too often…still, we must soldier on — in a some future bracket you an have a category of people who have tests named after them. Turing, Bechdel, Binet, Apgar, the team of Myers and Briggs, Rorshach… any one of them would be formidable competition.
Phil:
Regarding your second paragraph . . . maybe next time we could make it go faster by pitting contestants at each other 4 at a time rather than in pairs. It’s more of a pro wrestling thing. With 64 contestants, this would cut the number of matches down from 63 to . . . 21, which seems a lot more manageable: We’d get it all done in a month.
Why stop at 4, though? Why don’t you have all 64 of them duke it out in one giant melee? Would Pele have an advantage in a melee?
In a melee, Gareth Edwards (fourth-seeded in the Welsh category) would have a clear advantage
Jan:
Sure, but we want some build-up. I take Phil’s point that 63 of these competitions is too much. But 1 competition would not be enough. I think 21 would be a good number.
The King vs. a marquis. The guy that can explain us how he made that fabulous goal against Sweden (https://youtu.be/k1tKmCgF0sE) vs. the only one that would be able to write a polynomial to describe it. I go with O Rei, but maybe the audience thinks otherwise.
Pele wouldn’t get any joy against a back four of Laplace, Sartre, Descartes, and Thuram.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B97_TUyWygE
Thuram’s “Thinker” celebration homage to Monte? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp8QHXtQoIo
Goals, are what we want to see
But I guess there won’t be a net?
If no goals, we sift out a win
I guess it must be Laplace
(Sung to a derivative of a Naive Melody)
Wilde v. Voltaire is my preferred final, but I have a soft spot for Laplace.
Perhaps have some mercy on Pele and save him the pain?
On the other hand, as an expositor of mathematics Laplace has his flaws, and I agree with this take:
and this one {I haven’t read Lagrange or Gauss}:
ooops… a day late on this one: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/02/27/ellen-degeneres-vs-lebron-james-3-pele-advances/