How I Completed The $5000 Compression Challenge

Patrick Craig points to this page which details (in email) the strange life of an online challenge as posed, clarified and (at least to some eyes) met successfully. This should give pause to anyone willing to pose -- or accept -- seemingly impossible problems. In short, Patrick's not $5,000 richer, but you may think he deserves to be.

Comments

Are you for lawyers or against?

[mjh]

I think that a person's stance on this issue, of who was right and who was wrong, will indicate that same person's approval of lawyers and much of the practice of the law today.

If you are for the challengee, then you believe that exact specificity is more important than intent. And you inadvertantly empower the legal profession to profit from being better able to specify rules, etc. Which, in turn, gives those with money even more power. They can write the rules by which your interaction with them will be governed. You can be certain that the rules will be written to the advantage of the guy with the money.

If, on the other hand, you are for the challenger, then you believe that his intent was more important. (Considering that the challenge came from the compression FAQ, the exact definition of "compression" should have not been vague. It seems clear to me that his intent was obvious, even though his challenge wasn't very specific.) Still there is a problem with valuing intent over specificity. That is it's easy to misrepresent intent after the fact. Thus the need to clearly specify our intentions prior to anything we do. That being the case, with accurate documentation, it seems possible to me that we can discern the original intent w/out having to specify everything legalistically. For example, I think that I was able to clearly determine the challenger's intent well after the fact, and I did this having read the challengee's representation of the events.

Now you may say, in rebuttal, "Who cares who I choose? I don't get to make the law." But think of yourself as the jury trying to determine to whom you would award the money. You may one day find yourself on a jury and trying to determine who should be awarded money. I see this as a microcosm of exactly how our court system has gotten into the state that it's in. Specificity is clearly more important than intent. And it's that way because juries award that way. Since juries are comprised of members of society, it's not a far stretch to say that society as a whole regards specificity as more important than intent.

Is there any chance that we can change this? And if we did, would it be better?

The page has been removed by GeoCities

[locutus074]

There is now a mirror available.

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