It helped me to think of it this way: Alice is guessing that their coins are different (one possibility) and Bob is guessing that their coins are the same (the other possibility), so from either direction they are covered.
Yeah it still took a minute. The way I realised it was Bob is covering them for the same flips, so if he flips H, he covers if Alice flips a H too. But if she flips a T, Bob is no longer covering her, but she knows when Bob isn't covering her, if she guesses for the opposite, she'll cover them. 100%.
The next level is: Eve joins the game, and the coin gets another side.
And to show how to logically work out this answer (same spoiler warning applies):
I started with a truth table as well. It's pretty easy to show that if Alice (or without loss of generality Bob) uses a fixed "always guess H" or "always guess T" strategy, that wins in two cases, but in the other two cases Bob has no way to reliably win. For instance, if Alice always guesses H, then two cases become wins:
A B
H H W
H T ?
T H W
T T ?
But in the other two cases, Bob has the same T each time, so he doesn't have enough information to distinguish those cases, and thus he can't reliably guess correctly.
So Alice needs to use a strategy that depends on her flip. There are only two such strategies that don't trivially reduce to a constant guess: guess what you flip or guess the opposite of what you flip. Going with the former, where Alice guesses what she flips:
A B
H H W
H T ?
T H ?
T T W
From this, clearly if Bob guesses the opposite of what he flips, someone wins in all four cases.
The only other solution is to reverse the two: Alice guesses the opposite of what she flips, and Bob guesses what he flips.
This seems like a nice warm-up for other protocols that depend on agreed-upon strategy but not a secure channel for direct communication, such as Diffie Hellman or the Socialist Millionare Problem.
Another way to look at it is either they can both get the same result or they can get different results, if it's the same then Bob will be correct, if it's different then Alice will be correct
Yep, its a nice problem. Reformulating it such that there are two possibilites (the coins are either different or the same) rather than four (permutations of two coins) is the way to solve the problem.
I was going to post a hint rather than the solution, but you beat me to the punch.
A Alice's coin
Ac Alice's choice
B Ben's coin
Bc Ben's choice
They win if A's and Bc's OR B's and Ac's are the same
A Ac B Bc
T T T T W
H T T T W
T H T T W
H H T T L
T T H T W
H T H T L
T H H T W
H H H T W
T T T H W
H T T H W
T H T H L
H H T H W
T T H H L
H T H H W
T H H H W
H H H H W
It's easier to check for when they are losing:
A Ac B Bc
H H T T |they both stick to their choices
H T H T |they both flip
T H T H |they both flip
T T H H |they stick
So the winning strategy is if one of them sticks to his choice and other flips it's choice.
My experience arriving at this solution made me a bit curious as to how others solved it. Was there reasoning involved before you arrived at a strategy and verified it, or did the strategy just come to you? Did you try multiple strategies, and if so, was there a method to generating/iterating on them, or were they just coming to you and you tried them?
Brainteasers tend to follow a particular pattern. The amount of information the various Alices and Bobs and Charlies have seems at first glance to obviously be inadequate to the task they're given. Then a closer examination reveals that there's some sublte extra scrap of information, and you can generally assume than that the answer is to use that to trace out the possibilities to find the actual answer.
So knowing that, I just looked for what extra, non-obvious piece of information A and B had. It seems impossible to guess what the results of a coin-flip are in another room. But the players also know the result of their own flip, and so basing a strategy on that extra info is certainly going to be the answer. From there, since there are so few combinations of such a strategy, getting the right answer is pretty trivial.
I like this brain teaser (and I suspect the reason that Felton likes it as well) because it shows this general pattern for brain teasers very clearly. The "extra" piece of information is pretty obvious with a moments thought. And once you have it, the number of possible strategies using it is small enough that you can see the correct one quickly.
A lot of other brain teasers require a lot of pen and paper work even after you've guessed the "trick" in order to work through all the possiblities. So this is sort of a nice, boiled down "essence du brainteaser".
One of the main challenges, however, seems like it would rear its head as soon as you leave the confines of a defined brain teaser, where you know for sure that there is a "trick" even if you can't see it, and real world situations such as in programming, where you don't yet know if the specific problem is solvable at all.
I noticed something similar when I was studying math: Exercises of the variety "Prove x" or "Disprove x" were much more than twice as easy as exercises of the variety "Prove or disprove x".
A_coin B_coin A_guess B_guess
H H ? ?
H T ? ?
T H ? ?
T T ? ?
Then I tried to fill in the guesses, given that A_guess has to be based on B_coin and vice-versa. After making Alice guess the same as her coin flip, since that's a simple thing to try first, it was clear that Bob had to guess the opposite of his coin flip for each row to have exactly one correct match.
My thought process: It seemed obvious that fixed-guess strategies couldn't work, both from the proof in the article and from intuition that the inverse of your fixed guesses will always represent a failure case.
If a fixed strategy can't work, then the guesses must be decided dynamically. At the time the guess is made, only one bit of information (their own flip) is available to each participant, so each guess has to be based on that. With one bit of information, you could only choose two things: do the same, or do the inverse. The correct, asymmetric pair of strategies popped into my head at this point, and a quick truth table check confirmed it.
Exact same here. Thanks for analysing this though, because i had trouble rethinking my own process. I more had the feeling to try things a bit randomly and eliminate ranges of similar choices. But in fact it wasn't random, it did follow the exact train of thoughts you described, in that order.
I just thought about what strategies they could actually take without being able to communicate information or use the outcome of the others flip as an input to their decision. There are only a few things you could do- guess either heads or tails every time, guess your roll, or guess the opposite.
Then I realized if one took the "guess same" strategy and the other took the "guess opposite" strategy that would cover the bases.
As a team, they get two guesses. So those two guesses have to cover the space of possibilities, and a guess has to be of a form such that seeing one's own coin implies the guessed value of the hidden coin. (So, "Bob has heads" is not a valid strategy guess. A strategy guess has to describe the state of both coins, so each perskon's strategy guess cannot include two pairs of the form "mine=X, other=H " and also "mine=X, other=T".
This seems a bit awkward, but information theory "guessing" is called "error correction", and parity-checking is the simplest and by far most common strategy. (Advanced algorithms are fancier multidimensional parity computations)
So, their two guesses are "same" and "different" (aka parity 0 and 1). A and B each are allocated one of the two strategyGuesses, and translate observedCoin+strategyGuess=hiddenCoinGuess
Purely mechanically. Just writing down the problem statement we get:
\exists f,g: \forall a,b: (f(b)=a) | (g(a)=b)
where f,g are the guesses and a,b are the flips. Each guess is a function of the information available to the respective player -- the outcome of his own coin flip. There's only 4 unary boolean functions:
f,g \in {true,false,id,not}
The constant functions are out and order doesn't matter, so we're left with
{(id,not),(id,id),(not,not)}
Here I just tried (id,not) first, but 3 choices are easy to check exhaustively.
I followed almost exactly the same logic as sgreben, but without the notation.
First, I assume there is an answer, and at least a moderately interesting answer.
There is no way they can communicate information post-flip, therefore they must be able to cover every possible option.
They cannot cover every possible option by deciding what to write in advance, therefore they must decide what to write based on the flip. In fact, they must both decide based on the flip or they will not gain anything.
If you decide what to write based on the flip, there are only two real choices per player: write the same as what you got, or write the other one.
That leaves you with 3 overall options. Both taking the same of these choices won't work (I skipped over the calculation because they're not interesting solutions), so they must agree to take opposite choices.
Honestly the situation was a little confusing because I like to think about a thought experiment which is similar (a coordinated three-person game called "Betrayal" which exemplifies the weirdness of quantum mechanics) and due to this I imagined that the "win criterion" was "Alice and Bob both have to get each other's answer right."
When I re-read the description and said "oh, they only have to have one correct answer between them," it was just like, "how can I make sure that when Alice is wrong then Bob is right?". The solution followed about a second later, "well if Alice guesses the same as her flip, maybe Bob guesses the opposite of his", without any logic tables or further reasoning or anything. Then I drew up the 4 possible coin flips and the resulting predictions and wins, to prove that it was correct, just in case I was somehow missing something.
So what I did was wrote out all 16 possible outcomes in an excel spreadsheet. I used T and F for tails and heads, because I'm used to reasoning in true or false. http://i.imgur.com/jKYSo3P.png. Then I noticed the two edge cases of: TTTT, and FFFF and came to the conclusion that is was not possible for them to agree on the same guess beforehand (i.e. Both guess tails or both guess heads). So then, by trial and error, I checked what would happen if one chose the same as their flip, and the other chose different from their flip. I bolded the case where it was valid to my rules, and deleted an invalid case http://i.imgur.com/E3jnIkd.png, and saw that it worked.
This puzzle you can get without being "clever" by just following the logic:
Suppose Alice got Heads. Say she guesses Heads. Then when Bob gets Heads they win. When Bob gets Tails Alice is wrong so Bob needs to guess Heads when he gets Tails.
Flip the scenario around when Alice gets Tails and you get the whole strategy
I personally just worked through a concrete example. So Alice flips her coin and gets heads. I then just assume that she is going to guess the opposite of what she flipped, so she guesses tails.
For Alice to lose, Bob would have to have flipped heads. Now Bob knows, because he has discussed strategy with Alice prior to doing the flips that either Alice flipped tails, in which case she has won, or she has flipped heads, in which case she has lost. But Bob can then bet on heads, in which case he knows that he wins if Alice loses.
That was my way of reasoning things anyhow. As you can see from the other responses, there are many different ways of arriving at the right answer.
Alice and bob can then either do one of 3 (rational!) things - stick to a prior choice, guess their flip result, or guess the opposite of their flip result.
Both of them sticking to prior choice was shown not to work, leaving 8 permutations to investigate at most. But it is easier than that.
I started by assuming Alice will guess her flip result. Looking at the truth table
A B
h h :-)
h t :-(
t h :-(
t t :-)
This means the only losing possibilities are when the coins are different. Therefore Bob must guess the opposite of his flip result, to ensure no losing possibilities at all.
One of the things I learned was from the Singapore test question (about Cheryl's birthday) which was to parse the question for any clues. What tipped me off was the requirement that either or both of them could get the correct answer to satisfy the problem statement. Once I figured that out I came to the conclusion to try out the truth table where one participant holds their answer constant and the other does a negation of their answer. The truth table worked out.
I have to say I feel somewhat inadequate coming to the answer experimentally as opposed to what others did here.
Generally, it helps abstracting the problem away into the real constraints, in this case, the outcomes space, (i.e. 4 possibilities, that can be compressed into 2 bits of information bit 1 = 'same or different', bit 2 = 'head or tails', but in this case 'head or tails' is irrelevant), and then reasoning how each person communicates their bit of information to span the entire outcome space.
I wrote out the 4 possible coin flips and expected to try to work it out more or less by brute force but once I looked at the possibilities the answer came to me and seemed obviously correct at once. Brains are weird. Just because I am one doesn't mean I have the faintest clue why or how it does things.
The only information each person has it their own coin, so their strategy is a pair of functions (f,g) from bits to bits, where either fx=y or gy=x (or both) for any bits x and y. There are only four possibilities for f, so picking, at random, f=id, gives g immediately.
For me, I immediately guessed the strategy on my first guess (one same, one opposite) and somehow automagically intuited it was correct, but did not really understand why. Then I understood once I looked at the thread.
That was exactly my experience and the reason I asked the question :)
The answer just appeared with zero awareness of any effort or reasoning that may have lead to it -- the only reasoning I perceived was in verifying the solution. So I got curious as to how intuition could solve this problem roughly on its own, or with so little help from conscious reasoning that I didn't notice it.
From the replies it seems there are two key realizations that combined could lead directly to the solution, and both realizations strike me as things that intuition would be good at noticing. The first is that each player likely has deterministic rule that is dependent on their coin, so there are only two candidate strategies per player. And the second is that the players likely have different strategies.
i did it by thinking "let bob pick a strategy, and let alice pick her answer by knowing what bob is going to do. if bob always guesses his own coin, then when alice sees H she knows that either bob has H too and will therefore win for both of them, or bob has T and will therefore lose, but the only way to lose is if bob has T so if alice guesses T then they have all their bases covered". of course there is a simpler way to get the answer, as other posters have noted.
Downvoted because I don't think this should be at the top of the discussion. I always read comments first, especially with a title like "Hello, World" that doesn't give any clue about the content; and now I don't get a chance to think about this puzzle because the spoiler was the first thing I saw.
EDIT: To be clear, I am not downvoting because I think that this comment is unconstructive; clearly it is a useful contribution. At least as good as, and probably better than, having it appear later would be having more whitespace between the spoiler warning and the actual spoiler.
Yes, the intuitive way to think of it could be that the coins will either be the same (bob gets it right) or they will be different (alice gets it right)
however, if the puzzle is changed from 'either one or both their guesses are correct they win' to 'both their guesses should be correct to win', then the solution becomes tough!
Some discrete mathematicians are interested in this sort of problem, which they call "simultaneous hat guessing". There are quite a few papers, in case anyone is interested and unfamiliar with this sort of thing.
Another fun problem, probably better known, is sequential hat guessing: take 100 people in a line, arranged so that each person can see everyone in front of them, but no-one can see any of the people behind them. Everyone is given either a red or black hat to wear, but no one can see the color of their own hat, or the hat of anyone behind them. So the person at the back of the line can see everyone's hat but their own, the next person can see everyone's hat except the first person and their own, etc.
Now starting with the back of the line, each person is asked to publicly guess the color of their hat. The participants are allowed to agree upon a strategy, how many people can they guarantee guess correctly?
Things get crazy if you allow an infinite countable line of people, and put ear-muffs on anyone so that no one gets to hear anyone else's guess. Surprisingly, you can still save almost everyone (if you allow the axiom of choice).
The solution requires infinite memory (not just arbitrary finite memory, but an actual, non-compressible infinite value) which is of course impossible in reality.
Usually problems on "countable" structures need only finite memory (to process infinite streaming input), so this problem is rather misleading.
100 prisoners are each assigned a black or white hat, at random. As always, they cannot communicate after the hats are assigned. Then they are shown each other. None sees own hat, everyone sees everyone elses hat. Then they are led into separate rooms and each guesses their own hat color.
They win only if everybody guesses correctly. What strategy maximizes the probability of that event?
I haven't looked at any of the solutions. Or any of the other comments.So at the risk of posting a redundant comment :
Alice guesses that Bob's coin is the same as hers. Bob guesses that Alice's coin is the opposite to hers.
It's fairly straightforward. I'd like to know the computer science angle to this though.
EDIT:
From the computer science that I know :
We need to find an invariant that all permutations of coin flips always satisify. Intuition tells us that Alice's coin might be the same as Bob or vice versa :
If you construct a truth table :
Alice Bob Alice's Coin same as bob Bob's opposite to Alice
H H YES NO
T T YES NO
H T NO YES
T H NO YES
The expression :
Alice's coin same as Bob || Bob's opposite to Alice
Always evaluates to true. So Alice can guess her flip and Bob can guess the opposite.
But what if we had Alice , Bob and George and atleast one of them had to get the other two right ?
Is there a general pattern ?
Alice Bob George
H H H
H H T
H T H
H T T
T H H
T H T
T T H
T T T
Very clever. So I'm assuming they just don't write any links that involve using the full domain. (i.e. /somepage instead of http://www.whitehouse.gov/somepage)
Bonus points:
What if only one of them gets a coin to flip and then they must both come to an agreement on what the result was. They can talk but the NSA overhears everything they say and can crack every cipher they use. Can you maximize the chance that the NSA can't guess who got that coin AND Alice and Bob agree on the correct result?
Note: An open problem. You can look up cryptogenography for current results.
During Carter's era or today. In 90 I was trained for a year in computer engineering for our sonar computer mainframe including Assembly. The idea was that if we were on deployment and a bug caused a problem we could potentially figure it out and maybe fix it without stopping the mission. I was programming on my own for 8 years prior to that as a hobby so was actually correcting the instructor on a couple of occasions. There is also the rate DT which does programming all the time I think. I wanted to get into that rate but the wait was a year and I was impatient.
I think I was slow coming up with this, but basically I wrote a lot of tables out and came up with...SPOILER...
Alice always guessing the same as what she flips and Bob always guessing different.
But - my question is this: Are there any other possible solutions to this puzzle?
Either way, I'm pretty sure this is just an Illuminati code plot from the White House to find the world's top coders and recruit them into some CIA program.
OK, we get it, most HN readers were able to solve the puzzle in a minute or two. Most of us have done interview problems much more difficult.
I'm more interested to know what people think about Obama's proselytizing of computer science. It seems like a great move to me. Is he going about this in a smart way? Do you think he'll get the results that he's looking for?
> The puzzle is this: Can you think of a strategy Alice and Bob can use that is guaranteed to win every time?
Raise campaign finance from the wealthy so that they can make it past the lesterland election[0].
Now that you have a war chest and are in the general election you just need to raise more capital from the 0.1%, buy more advertising, hire the best staff in Washington and bam!
I know this is not the coding question at hand, but a more important question on how unequal our political system is and I couldn't forgo the opportunity to ever so gently show the obvious reality - once you past the lesterland wealthy elite and get their backing, winning is only a matter of time.
It is also a massive violation of the rights of companies and their shareholders.
Consider that if Windows/IE were really that bad, people would have just switched more readily to a Microsoft competitor. Desktop-quality Linux would have come about/come about sooner, or something equivalent.
This is an example of the point that there is no such thing as a monopoly unless it's created through legal channels (i.e. is granted by the government).
There is no business that can't be competed against with sufficient capital.
And the global economy accumulates spare capital over time (because in the net, the species produces more than it consumes).
Even "natural monopolies" are a function of a mistaken way to implement property rights, as opposed to being "natural." Because you can always build underneath or around whatever is already there.
edit: This is a serious intellectual comment that deserves to be read. It also matters a lot for our industry. Consider Google in Europe right now.
Ok, I've read it. I agree it is serious. But I think it's also wrong. Monopolies can be abused in ways that make it almost impossible to compete against them. Let's use Windows as an example. Some companies that sell Windows boxes also sell Linux boxes. (Dell for example.) Of course, the Linux boxes are less popular. But why not sell a computer that can dual boot? People would be a lot more willing to experiment with Linux if they didn't have to install it themselves. Indeed, around 1999 a young company was trying to popularize its new operating system: BeOS. I am quoting from this site:
"[...] Be was engaged in enthusiastic discussions with Dell, Compaq, Micron, and Hitachi. Taken together, pre-installation arrangements with vendors of this magnitude could have had a major impact on the future of Be and BeOS. But of the four, only Hitachi actually shipped a machine with BeOS pre-installed. The rest apparently backed off after a closer reading of the fine print in their Microsoft Windows License agreements. Hitachi did ship a line of machines (the Flora Prius) with BeOS pre-installed, but made changes to the bootloader -- rendering BeOS invisible to the consumer -- before shipping. Apparently, Hitachi received a little visit from Microsoft just before shipping the Flora Prius, and were reminded of the terms of the license."
If Windows started sucking, people would switch. Demand would arise for a better alternative. In the long run, companies and consumers are not going to choose a significantly inferior product.
There are no specific examples that will get you out of this.
Actually, it Windows already kinda does suck, which is why so many people (even companies) use Apple. And there are lots of other alternative OSs.
Unfortunately the example given and the "windows tax" is a perfect example. Microsoft had such size and control over the industry they could strangle competitors at birth. Who knows what they would have done without this tiresome legislation.
No, I'm saying that there is no example possible that will negate the point. Because the point is true.
I mean, you can keep taking it out one level, and competition can happen there. For instance: Can't compete due to OEM agreements with MS? Have to get an OEM to capitulate, or start your own OEM, or find another way to get your competing OS on machines. There is no specific example that will make the argument that competition is impossible go through.
Why didn't you try to understand what I said instead of taking the cheapest opportunity to pick on it?
>No, I'm saying that there is no example possible that will negate the point. Because the point is true.
You can't dismiss evidence ahead of time because you're convinced your theory is true.
this isn't a cheap opportunity to pick at your argument, it's a huge red flag that you have a fundamental error in your reasoning.
>I mean, you can keep taking it out one level, and competition can happen there. For instance: Can't compete due to OEM agreements with MS? Have to get an OEM to capitulate, or start your own OEM, or find another way to get your competing OS on machines. There is no specific example that will make the argument that competition is impossible go through.
Fine - but this argument doesn't model reality, and this is where the relevance of evidence comes in: many times competition is theoretically possible but won't occur since no one wants to risk a lot of capital and time and effort on what will likely be an unsuccessful venture.
So if an unregulated Microsoft manages to lean on their competitors enough that people don't want to try competing anymore, then competition is still possible, but without regulation it won't occur.
> You can't dismiss evidence ahead of time because you're convinced your theory is true.
There is no possible counter-evidence. You'd say the same thing about lots of things---for example, that the Earth is spherical.
So you are mistaken here about how epistemology works.
> many times competition is theoretically possible but won't occur since no one wants to risk a lot of capital and time and effort on what will likely be an unsuccessful venture.
That isn't borne out in reality. It's very easy to compete against a shitty product with a superior product, and there is plenty of capital to compete with any product that exists today.
> So if an unregulated Microsoft manages to lean on their competitors enough that people don't want to try competing anymore
What does it mean to "lean on competitors"? Nothing. It's meaningless. There is literally nothing a company can do to "lean on" competitors unless they use the law to do it. They can lean on other market participants---e.g., OEMs, But you can always get around that because you can start a competing OEM or get an OEM to capitulate. That's why I say I can always take the argument out one level.
I'm most likely not going to continue responding. I will if you ask a question out of curiosity, but I'm not interested in "aruging" with you further.
You said not to take the cheap shots, so I replied two minutes ago with a real comment. This one is a cheap shot: starting your own OEM will not help: MS won't give you a windows license. But you will say that just means you must try something else.
So according to you, it's alright for a company to hold a monopoly position and erase their competitors, as long as they provide the bare minimum its customers need?
No. I said that there is no such thing as a monopoly except legally-created monopolies.
Those are, in effect, government created. I am totally against that. I am totally against government passing laws to favor certain people over others, treating people unequally.
Most "free" markets don't have perfect competition, nor perfect information, nor rational actors. It's possible for Microsoft to provide a terrible service and for no better competitors to emerge.
Consider last-mile telephone lines. It's wasteful to have ten companies each spend billions of dollars digging up the same roads to lay the same cables - and it's a nearly-impossible barrier to entry for new competitors. Sure, anything is possible with "sufficient capital", but fundamentally it's an inefficient waste of time and investor money to recreate a service that already exists, and the investors will be correspondingly scarce.
Most countries have enacted legislation enforcing fairly shared use of such lines (breaking up monopolies in the process) because cooperation is fundamentally more efficient than competition as effort is not wasted in duplication.
As a result, the ISP/telco market in civilized countries has since escaped from that stagnant local maxima with its high barrier-of-entry, to a more agile, more competitive state where smaller players have a fair chance of competing. I'm not sure if this includes the USA though (c.f. Comcast/TWC merger complaints, single-ISP areas, the "Worst company in america" award, unending complaints on /r/technology &c).
There's an easy solution to the last-mile problem, which is for communities to own the infrastructure and operate it as a non-profit.
Believe me, people would do that if they were getting sufficiently screwed by telcos and if it were legal.
Actually, the former condition is already satisfied, but the latter is (basically) not.
Though there have been lots of municipal broadband efforts, which is a point in my favor, here. The telcos fight them tooth and nail using the legal system.
That is just another example of a legal monopoly (as opposed to a natural monopoly---no such thing).
The solution is for the lines to be operated prioritizing the community before profit, yes. We've agreed on the fundamentals but now differ in imagination of the size of the community.
Why not extend such egality to all citizens? And why do people have to get "screwed by telcos" first before it can happen?
I agree with you, but perhaps for a slightly different reason. I worked for Microsoft in 2001 and 2003, and recently rejoined the company. I have had enough time away from Microsoft that I feel safe in saying that I have perspective both from the inside and from the outside.
The biggest drawback that I saw from the DOJ decision was that Microsoft was not allowed to innovate. Windows 98 and Active Desktop can be considered an early precursor to today's web applications like Chrome packaged apps and Firefox apps. How might the application landscape look today if XP were firmly rooted in the concept of web applications rather than native applications? The decision against Microsoft actually slowed them down and allowed them to slowly outlast their competitors.
Instead of fighting a browser war, Netscape might have pivoted and created a Chrome OS like operating system that ran on top of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. Google might have become known for creating a rich set of web-centric APIs that Netscape OS leveraged.
Instead, Netscape got stuck in an entrenched losing battle over a product. It was myopia that defeated them. The DOJ decision delayed the inevitable and it caused Netscape to waste resources thinking they had a chance in a "fair" fight. The Web 2.0 revolution was poised to take place on the desktop rather than in the browser. As a result, I think we all have suffered a 15 year setback.
I feel in the same way that an EU decision against Google won't correct any injustices, but it might stifle innovation; and not just innovation from Google, but its competitors as well.
That's not the way I work. And you can see that from my statement. I don't invoke any moral principles to make my case. It's all pretty down to earth.
edit: Actually, to elaborate...
A better way to put it: I go from the ground up, not the top down.
Most ideologies go top-down, which is utterly futile and is why people believe there is a dichotomy between the moral and the practical, i.e., principles and pragmatism.
Going top-down produces ideologies that are floating abstractions. Castles in the air. They end up being more constricting then they are empowering. Nearly every ideology you have ever heard of is like this. That is why you reject ideology.
If you do it from the ground up, you get an entirely different result.
... Obama [...] became the first president to write a line of code ...
Wasn't the Dictator of Singapore earlier with his Sudoku?
This is a ridiculous stunt, and it sets the wrong accents. Coding is being hyped while the people who actually keep us alive and in good condition work 3 jobs and can't afford health insurance.
Meantime, Obama destroys the Constitution and betrays the People of the U.S. to the NSA and their ilk like none did before. I think I'm getting sick.
You mean the PM of Singapore? Anyway, they are obviously referring to POTUS's only. (You can bet eg Dr Angela Merkel wrote some code in her time as well.)
Bob always chooses the same as his flip, Alice always chooses the opposite of her flip.