Is there any chance that a 1300 rated player can beat a 2700 rated player?

Did you not see the Chris Rock/Mike Tyson analogy?

Is this guy serious?

Well I did read your post, so of course I know it's a joke. I'm just saying something true in response to what I quoted.

I don't know about the boxing analogy.  Leon Spinks was mugged and beaten up by a street thug.

No throwing up analogy that I know.

Of course Chris has 0 chanch vs Tyson. But I took a boxing lesson in 78 and beat up the neighborhood bully. I give myself a a reasonable chanch vs Tyson. I'd stomp on his foot, maybe bite an ear or two. Spray mace in his face, get out the brass knuckles and give him an old fashion whooping.

Some people will have to say goodbye to their family name for good when I'm done. It's what they were asking for decades apparently, and disappointing a moron, or a bunch of them, is not my forte.

Easy to do.

Can you throw a coin and get 10 000 tails in a row? Of course you "can"...

Colin20G wrote:

Can you throw a coin and get 10 000 tails in a row? Of course you "can"...

It will not ever happen. Conclusion?

You can't flip a coin 10 thousand times resulting in tails everytime. No matter what any mathamatical formula you give, it does not "prove" the possibility.

Now, if a machine did the flipping and the exact parameters were duplicated each toss, then I have no arguement. Otherwise it is impossible.

Impossibilities are not possible.

Colin20G wrote:

Now, if a machine did the flipping and the exact parameters were duplicated each toss, then I have no arguement. Otherwise it is impossible.

What if the 'machine' is a well trained human that can duplicate the toss 10k times. This is possible.

There are really impossible things...

Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!

Alfred E. Neuman

The fact that there are impossible things is hardly surprising. It's obvious (?) one can't draw a straight line with a compass. We already saw some less trivial examples. For example, I can't create a slider device that would allow switching between all slider puzzles available at this site. Such a device would constitute a mega-puzzle to which a switch will have to be provided, which in turn would create another mega-mega-puzzle and so on ad infinitum. Selfreferences allow for questions that could not be logically answered.

However, if you think that the only impossible things are trivial and those that depend on some kind of math trickery, think twice. There are really impossible things. There are a few known yet from antiquity that were attempted by dozens (and probably more) for thousands years until their impossibility has been revealed in recent times.

A good half of all starting positions in the Fifteen puzzle are unsolvable.

Constructing a triangle from its angle bisectors is in general impossible

Creating a machine that would tell for every statement whether it's true or false.

Deriving Euclid's fifth postulate from the other four.

Doubling a cube

Finding the center of a given circle with the straightedge alone

An Impossible Frame

An Impossible Fork

An Impossible Page

Impossible to optimize the ratio Area/Price by a combination of two pizzas of different sizes.

Moving pegs five places in one direction

Representing √2 as a rational fraction p/q.

Solving the general quintic equation in radicals.

Squaring a circle

Structural Constellation

Trisecting an angle (in general)

Emptying Prisons with Simple Shapes

It is impossible to find four consecutive integers whose product is a square.

I am of the opinion that the phrase "anything is possible" is meant to keep humans dreaming. The truth is (sorry for bringing Tom's thread into this): "what the human mind can conceive it can achieve". It might be a hundred years after your death (ask Tesla) before your conception is technologically possible, but it can happen. As "advanced" as we are, we are adolescents at best. You may say "discovering a superior or inferior race 100 light years away is completely impossible". We don't know. We do know

, however, a 1300 never beats a 2700.

I find the arguement "well, with infinite time and in another universe" to be irrelevant. Of course, making up such scenarios, anything is possible. Example: one day a monkey, given enough time and unlimited typewriters could produce Shakespeare.

My thinking goes to the present. Is it possible today? Not sometime in the future, with changed parameters. I asked, is it possible for elephants to fly? Several answered yes, why not someday? How to argue? If evolution changes their ears to wings, I agree. But not today! It Is Impossible for elephants to fly.

Yes I completely agree chess king. The world is full of romantics

Unlike with elephants being terrestrial now but evolving wings in the future, no parameters need to change for the coin flip example. It could happen the very next time someone attempts it. It's trivially plausible that I could flip a coin five times and get heads each time. From there, it's trivially plausible that the next five could also be heads--unlikely, but very realistic. If I continue to chain those together, at what point do you propose that it breaks down and enters the realm of the impossible, and what do you propose causes that?

mdinnerspace wrote:

I find the arguement "well, with infinite time and in another universe" to be irrelevant. Of course, making up such scenarios, anything is possible. Example: one day a monkey, given enough time and unlimited typewriters could produce Shakespeare.

My thinking goes to the present. Is it possible today? Not sometime in the future, with changed parameters. I asked, is it possible for elephants to fly? Several answered yes, why not someday? How to argue? If evolution changes their ears to wings, I agree. But not today! It Is Impossible for elephants to fly.

Ha! Both scenarios absurd. Thank you for agreeing with me and subtly kicking me in the balls. I respectfully disagree. Einstein, Tesla and a host of other men are considered genius now, while ridiculed and called insane while practicing their craft. Less romantic, more visionary IMHO.

This reminds me of a person who argued and argued and just couldn't understand that the growth rate of hair could be given in miles per hour. They understood how 0.5 miles per hour was possible, or 1/3 or 1/4, but at some point in their mind, when the numbers were small enough, it just magically went to zero.

Another way to say it.

1 is possible.
2 tails in a row is possible
3 tails in a row is possible
.
.
.
10,000 is not possible.

So this is arguing at some number, lets say 226 tails in a row, that there is a 100% chance the next flip is heads because 227 is impossible.

This is of course absurd. The next flip is always (roughly) 50% chance.

Ironically you don't realize you and chess king are two romantics yourselves... going with your gut instead of logic.