this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I go for option 1.

In all programming languages that I know, integers have a maximum number. E.g., in C that'd be 2,147,483,647. After that, you would run into an overflow, resulting in either...

  • a crash (train stops, no more deaths),
  • death count suddenly turns negative (all people previously killed are suddenly alive again and even new people are generated out of nowhere) - until we reach the next overflow when people disappear and start dying again
  • or - if it's an unsigned integer - death count resets everytime we reach the maximum limit

So compared to option 2, we have a chance of stopping the death count. And even if the train keeps running, we have essentially option 2 but the same people only die very rarely. If we assume a cycle of 1 death per second and an integer boundary of 2,147,483,647, that's just one death every 68 years per person involved. Seems more fair to me compared to 100 people constantly dying over and over again.

[–] mattd 10 points 18 hours ago

So the Zapp Brannigan approach?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 20 hours ago

They used database to store integer...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 23 hours ago

Yeah okay but by that logic you'd also have to quantize time and the suffering would end either way in a finite amount of time.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Or is it like a Y2K death trolly and when the overflow happens the universe doesn't catch the exception and things get weird. Like suddenly any number can be divided by 0.