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kiki
151d

A fun fact about Yuri Gagarin's flight:
Before the flight, it was not yet known how the human psyche would behave in space, so a special protection was provided to prevent the first cosmonaut from trying to control the ship's flight or damage the equipment in a fit of madness. To enable manual control, he had to open a sealed envelope, inside which lay a sheet with a mathematical problem, the solution of which gave the code for unlocking the control panel.

Comments
  • 6
    I appreciate the history trivia but I need to do this:
  • 10
    Yuri Gagarin opening the envelope with the Riemann Hypothesis in it: "suka blyat!"
  • 8
    Having studied maths, I'd say that 1) insanity is no obstacle to solving mathematical problems, in fact the opposite is often the case, and 2) given that he was Russian it would have to have been a extremely difficult problem.
  • 2
    This is supposed to be what job interviews are.
  • 4
    @donkulator there is a thing called матановая капча, literally “calculus captcha”. Russians use it on some tech and engineering-oriented websites.

    Here's a translated version of an article about it: https://translated.turbopages.org/p...

    (“Matan” here means calculus)
  • 0
    @kiki I like the fact that most of them seem to rely on the user knowing a shortcut that makes most of the terms disappear, so getting past them requires constructive laziness.

    Is there a time limit though? You can't be letting in people who get the right answer by doing a spreadsheet.
  • 0
    @donkulator those who can realize a spreadsheet approach can solve it deserve to pass.
  • 0
    @kiki Not sure about that. Some of the examples are stuff like what is the limit of (2x^5+5x^3-3x^2)/(x^5-7x^2) as x tends to infinity.

    There are two acceptable solutions to that: "2 by inspection" and "I don't understand". If they know enough maths to work it out but they feel the need to do it laboriously, they're dangerous.
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