It's hard for me to imagine _dividing_ by -1~1 in a real-world scenario, but let's say we divide by 0~10, which also includes zero. For example, we are dividing the income between 0 to 10 shareholders (still forced, but ok).
Clearly, it's possible to have a division by zero here, so "0 sharehodlers would each get infinity". And in fact, if you try to compute 500 / 0, or even 500~1000 / 0, it will correctly show infinity.
But if you divide by a range that merely _includes_ zero, I don't think it should give you infinity. Ask yourself this: does 95% of results of 500 / 0~10 become infinity?
Wow, this is fantastic! I did not know about squiggle language, and it's basically what I was trying to get to from my unsure calculator through my next project (https://filiph.github.io/napkin/). Squiggle looks and works much better.
I'm familiar with fuzzy numbers (e.g. see my https://filiph.net/fuzzy/ toy) but I didn't know there's arithmetic with fuzzy numbers. How is it done? Do you have a link?
There is a book by Hanss on it. It focuses on the sampling approach (he calls it "transformation method") though.
If you want to do arithmetic and not a black box approach you just have to realize that you can perform them on the alpha-cuts with ordinary interval arithmetic. Then you can evaluate arbitrary expressions involving fuzzy numbers, keeping the strengths and weaknesses of interval arithmetic.
The sampling based approach is very similar to Monte-Carlo, but you sample at certain well defined points.
Part of the confusion here is likely that the tool, as seen on the web, probably lags significantly behind the code. I've started using a related but different tool (https://filiph.github.io/napkin/).
The HN mods gave me an opportunity to resubmit the link, so I did. If I had more time, I'd have also upgraded the tool to the latest version and fix the wording. But unfortunately, I didn't find the time to do this.
The reason I'm asking: unsure also has a CLI version (which is leaps and bounds faster and in some ways easier to use) but I rarely find myself using it. (Nowadays, I use https://filiph.github.io/napkin/, anyway, but it's still a web app rather than a CLI tool.)
I think I was looking at this and several other similar calculators when creating the linked tool. This is what I mean when I say "you'll want to use something more sophisticated".
The problem with similar tools is that of the very high barrier to entry. This is what my project was trying to address, though imperfectly (the user still needs to understand, at the very least, the concept of probability distributions).
It's all computed in the browser so yeah, it's JavaScript. Still, 8 seconds is a lot -- I was targeting sub-second computation times (which I find alright).
Something I should have probably addressed in the article but didn't get to it for brevity: there are at least two kinds of immersion, and people tend to conflate them. (I'm not immune to this.)
There's intellectual immersion. Flow. You can be intellectually immersed reading a book or playing chess.
Then there's sensory immersion. Put a VR on, you're immersed this way.
> Before I had gaming hardware I wasted the exact same amount of time by re-reading books and comics, and it was quite immersive.
If so, you are in the minority. For most people, it is easier and more natural to put down a book and go do something else, than it is to quit a video game. Media consumption metrics seem to corroborate this.
> That sounds an awful lot like the good old "why do we build space rockets when people are starving".
If you want to simplify the article this way, sure, but then it's "why do we build ever-more immersive entertainment when we could build space rockets or try to address starvation". I think there's a difference. (And of course, even then we're losing all nuance of the actual article, but I guess there's no way around that.)
