Ask Anything Wednesday - Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1j44zjm/ask_anything_wednesday_engineering_mathematics/

created by AutoModerator on 05/03/2025 at 15:00 UTC

131 upvotes, 15 top-level comments (showing 15)

Welcome to our weekly feature, Ask Anything Wednesday - this week we are focusing on **Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science**

Do you have a question within these topics you weren't sure was worth submitting? Is something a bit too speculative for a typical /r/AskScience post? No question is too big or small for AAW. In this thread you can ask any science-related question! Things like: "What would happen if...", "How will the future...", "If all the rules for 'X' were different...", "Why does my...".

*Asking Questions:**

Please post your question as a top-level response to this, and our team of panellists will be here to answer and discuss your questions. The other topic areas will appear in future Ask Anything Wednesdays, so if you have other questions not covered by this weeks theme please either hold on to it until those topics come around, or go and post over in our sister subreddit /r/AskScienceDiscussion , where every day is Ask Anything Wednesday! Off-theme questions in this post will be removed to try and keep the thread a manageable size for both our readers and panellists.

*Answering Questions:**

Please only answer a posted question if you are an expert in the field. The full guidelines for posting responses in AskScience can be found here[1]. In short, this is a moderated subreddit, and responses which do not meet our quality guidelines will be removed. Remember, peer reviewed sources are always appreciated, and anecdotes are absolutely not appropriate. In general if your answer begins with 'I think', or 'I've heard', then it's not suitable for /r/AskScience.

1: http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/wiki/index#wiki_answering_askscience

If you would like to become a member of the AskScience panel, please refer to the information provided here[2].

2: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/about/sticky

Past AskAnythingWednesday posts can be found here[3]. Ask away!

3: http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/search?q=flair%3A%27meta%27&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all

Comments

Comment by Jim_Noise at 05/03/2025 at 15:14 UTC

13 upvotes, 1 direct replies

At what stage is Quantum Computing?

Comment by Jasong222 at 05/03/2025 at 17:49 UTC*

9 upvotes, 4 direct replies

"If the science books were to all be destroyed and written again they would be exactly the same" - is that true? I read a quote recently, attributed to Ricky Gervais, that said- "If you were to destroy all the religion/religious books, they would eventually all be rewritten, and they would all be different than the current ones. But if you were to destroy all the science books, they too would be rewritten, but they would all be exactly the same as the current ones."

I thought about this and... Science can also have it's... projections. It's mis-framing of what's going on with data/results. So I thought about asking some scientists- How true is this claim? (About the science books specifically).

Comment by frowawayduh at 05/03/2025 at 18:06 UTC

4 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Is there a finite amount of spacetime?

Comment by Hardass_McBadCop at 08/03/2025 at 14:51 UTC

2 upvotes, 2 direct replies

Maybe this is a bit too basic, but can anyone explain to me how programming works? Like on a mechanical level. How does binary on a screen become real - become actual electricity and switches in a machine? How does code actually act its instructions out?

Like for example, let's say I wrote a short segment that just stored a number in memory. Say, 2. So in binary that's 10 and the memory register would have one switch open and one closed for the two bits needed to store that. But how does that code, after it's compiled into binary, open/close switches, create logic gates, or interact with the CPU to do calculations?

For a metaphor of what I'm trying to really get at, if I wanted to turn on a light switch: I think about it and my brain uses electricity to cause my muscles to contract in a way that makes my arm move and physically turn the switch on/off. So if my thought is the "code" and my brain is the "compiler" that turns it into something the rest of my body can act on, then how does the rest work that leads to the real world, physical action of opening and closing the switch?

I hope that made sense.

Comment by anooblol at 06/03/2025 at 00:44 UTC

3 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Maybe someone can clear up a misunderstanding I have with measure theory.

My understanding is that the measure of a subset A of X is less than or equal to the measure of X. And that the measure of sets is countably additive.

Consider the following:

Let X be the set of the intersection of the rationals Q and the interval [0,1].

X is a subset of Q, and thus countable. So there exists a bijection f from N to X. f(n)=xn.

For each xn, consider an open interval Xn of length 1/(pi * n)^2 centered at xn. So m(Xn) = 1/(pi * n)^2

The Union of all Xn’s, call it A, is an open covering of the interval [0,1], since X is dense in [0,1]. I.e, since every point in [0,1] is arbitrarily close to a point in X, it must be contained in one of our open intervals, Xn.

By construction of A, [0,1] is a strict subset of A. And so m(A) > m([0,1]).

But the measure of A is at most the countably infinite sum of m(Xn) for all n in N, is the sum of each 1/(pi * n)^2 , which converges to the value 1/6. (At most, because these are not disjoint unions. We are over covering the space).

So 1 = m([0,1]) < m(A) <= 1/6. So 1 < 1/6. A contradiction.

What am I getting wrong here? There’s obviously something I’m fundamentally misunderstanding. The only step I can think of being wrong, is that this isn’t actually an open cover of [0,1], but I have a very hard time believing that.

Comment by debtmagnet at 05/03/2025 at 20:12 UTC

1 upvotes, 2 direct replies

I have heard it asserted that a human's complete genetic sequence requires 1 to 4gb of disk, depending on the encoding and compression mechanisms. If I wanted to preserve my genetic sequence for a future civilization to discover more than a millennium from now, what existing (non-theoretical) storage medium would best survive a duration of thousands of years under ideal conditions?

Could our modern standard NTFS/EXT4 disk formatting structure and our UTF encoding be reverse engineered without apriori knowledge of our language and alphabetic system?

Comment by Green__lightning at 06/03/2025 at 06:52 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

How do regenerative blowers stall?

Comment by bumbasaur at 06/03/2025 at 11:02 UTC

1 upvotes, 3 direct replies

How long it will take for the current research papers to be converted to readable form with just a high school knowledge.

Comment by Osiris_Raphious at 06/03/2025 at 14:06 UTC

1 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Do we assume electron is a single entity?

Or is it like a cloud of quantum matter with the energy potential, like a density field that moves around and we percieve as a solid electron. Or am I just describing QED...

additionally if relativity is correct, then scaling down to subatomic, shouldnt we also account for the time dialation in some way?

Comment by ThinNeighborhood2276 at 07/03/2025 at 11:00 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

What are the practical applications of quantum computing in engineering?

Comment by rassen-frassen at 05/03/2025 at 20:12 UTC*

1 upvotes, 2 direct replies

Computer Science: What would you consider to be a better name for AI that more represents what it is, and removes the cultural connotations of "Intelligence"?

I recently watched an interview with Roger Penrose (here)[https://youtu.be/biUfMZ2dts8?si=hF9CG4V-VmKJhV7T] wherein he repeats his distaste for the term "AI"; "We've lost the plot." I agree that as a society as a whole our perspective and concerns about "AI" are shaped by our preconceptions of the name.

AI, AGI, Machine Learning all carry the wrong implication. Machines can't be intelligent because Intelligence requires understanding, which requires consciousness. (Penrose). I recently began looking at "AI" training jobs, and the underlying "learning" is a quite obviously an increasingly more refined sense of parameters, which are further refined through data scraping.

I see them as Advanced Programming. "AI" exists within computers, which are inert materials until provided power and programming to preform.The fact that we've foolishly made every bit of ourselves available to be downloaded, that's just 0 and 1 data to input, however complicated. I feel our misconceptions increase the danger of Advanced Programming/ Data Processing, and how we approach and allow it.

How do you view it? Where might I be wrong as a layman? What would you call Artificial Intelligence, to help us understand rather than mystify?

edit: formatting

Comment by not_a_cumguzzler at 05/03/2025 at 16:41 UTC*

0 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Regarding the relationship between size and strength in humans vs robots, is it accurate to say that:

- for humans, mass grows cubically relative to length, whereas strength grows approximately quadratically to length (because strength is a function of muscle cross sectional area). So someone who is 6ft tall is approx 2x as tall/wide and 4x as strong as someone who is 3ft tall, but 8x as heavy (hypothetically), so a human's strength to weight ratio goes down as they get taller (specifically, heavier)

- but with electric motors (i.e. the joints of robots), torque grows proportionally to mass (based on what i'm seeing here https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/18480[1][2] and here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234118088%5C_Scaling%5C_Laws%5C_in%5C_Robotics[3])

1: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/18480

2: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/18480

3: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234118088%5C_Scaling%5C_Laws%5C_in%5C_Robotics

TLDR: is it accurate to say that in humans, strength grows sub-linearly with mass (1/x). whereas for electric motors, torque grows linearly with mass.

TLDR: robots can scale.

Wait a minute, can someone further this to the effects of the end-manipulator? (i.e. the damage done by the fist at the end of a punch? maybe in terms of energy behind the fist?).