• Mikina@programming.dev
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    18 hours ago

    Couldn’t you argue that 0% is correct?

    It’s a paradox, no of the answers can be correct, so the chance that you pick the correct one is 0%.

    Sure, by picking it, it makes it wrong, but you don’t care about that.

    If you ran a infite monte carlo test on it, you’d end up with 0% correct answers.

    Sure, picking the zero makes it not true again, but you don’t care about that - it prooves that the statistical test holds.

    • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@feddit.uk
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      12 hours ago

      The trick is that there is no paradox, only the implication of one. ‘If’ being the key word - you’re not actually being asked to answer randomly, but you are being subtly trolled.

    • balsoft@lemmy.ml
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      10 hours ago

      If you ignore self-referential nature of the question and stop the iteration at some point, sure, you can argue that any answer is correct.

      If you ran a infite monte carlo test on it, you’d end up with 0% correct answers.

      That would mean your Monte Carlo test is set up incorrectly because at least 1/4 of the results of the test would be the “correct” answer as per your own argument, thus invalidating it.

    • AirBreather@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      Nah it’s a paradox. There’s no such thing as just a freestanding Monte Carlo test that you can just “run” - you do actually need to define enough parameters to make it tell you anything.

      This kind of self-referential stuff feels like a proof of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems with extra steps.