Students Find New Evidence of the Impossibility of Complete Disorder — Plenty of noise surrounded this announcement. The substance underneath it is what deserves attention.
A new mathematic proof marks the first progress in decades on a problem about how order emerges.
wired.com first reported the change, and the initial reaction focused on what it announced. The more interesting question is what it sets up for the months ahead, and that is where the practical consequences sit.
There is a longer arc here. Treating the current announcement as a single event misses the pattern that connects it to what came before.
What changed
The specific mechanism matters as much as the headline. At the level of implementation, the change is narrower than the coverage implies, and considerably more actionable for people who plan their setup around it.
- In late 2017, Ashwin Sah and Mehtaab Sawhney met as undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- Since then, the pair have written a mind-boggling 57 math proofs together, many of them profound advances in various fields.
- For example, the set {2, 4, 8, 16, …}, in which each number doubles the one before it, is so spread out along the number line that it’s said to make up 0 percent of the whole numbers.
Why it matters
The commercial framing tends to dominate the discussion, and it should. The question that decides whether any of this matters is whether the everyday experience improves for a household watching several hours a day.
What to watch
Two things are worth tracking. First, whether the early adopter experience holds as more people sign up. Second, whether the pricing structure survives the first round of competition. Both answers should arrive within the year.
The practical detail
The concrete checklist is this: hardware support, regional availability, contract length, and what happens to the service if the operator changes its approach.
What matters here is that the details will shift as more reporting lands, but the direction is clear enough to plan around.
This article draws on reporting from wired.com. Read the original coverage for the full account.
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This matches my own experience after switching providers last year.
Thanks for covering this. The pricing comparison alone was worth the read.
I would be curious to see a follow-up after the next firmware update.
Interesting results, although I wonder about the sample size here.
Read this twice and it answered most of my questions about setup and compatibility.
Not always the case though — it depends heavily on the region.