Return to Answer

Source Link

edited Jan 31, 2017 at 23:32

121.9k
7
320
464

The key thing seems to be that

there are only five (not six) connections between the two boxes on the right; some information is necessarily lost on the way around.

So perhaps

the yellow thing at the bottom is an LED or similar, and the annotation says "this-thing-on-the-left not lit-up for-all inputs". In other words, whatever you put into the boxes, it can't arrange for the signals coming out of them all to equal the signals going in.

I suppose I should say explicitly that

the circuitry at bottom left is testing exactly that, as described in humn's answer.

It's not clear to me, though,

what the rightmost part of the annotation means. If the rightmost symbol were a 6, it could signify something like "... input of size 6", but boboquack has already indicated that it isn't. [EDITED to add: oops, no he hasn't; in fact he conspicuously didn't, and it turns out it was a 6 and meant pretty much exactly that.]

As for the application in physics,

there are a number of things in physics with this sort of flavour. It might for instance point at Liouville's theorem on conservation of phase-space volume, or maybe something to do with the second law of thermodynamics.

The key thing seems to be that

there are only five (not six) connections between the two boxes on the right; some information is necessarily lost on the way around.

So perhaps

the yellow thing at the bottom is an LED or similar, and the annotation says "this-thing-on-the-left not lit-up for-all inputs". In other words, whatever you put into the boxes, it can't arrange for the signals coming out of them all to equal the signals going in.

I suppose I should say explicitly that

the circuitry at bottom left is testing exactly that, as described in humn's answer.

It's not clear to me, though,

what the rightmost part of the annotation means. If the rightmost symbol were a 6, it could signify something like "... input of size 6", but boboquack has already indicated that it isn't.

As for the application in physics,

there are a number of things in physics with this sort of flavour. It might for instance point at Liouville's theorem on conservation of phase-space volume, or maybe something to do with the second law of thermodynamics.

The key thing seems to be that

there are only five (not six) connections between the two boxes on the right; some information is necessarily lost on the way around.

So perhaps

the yellow thing at the bottom is an LED or similar, and the annotation says "this-thing-on-the-left not lit-up for-all inputs". In other words, whatever you put into the boxes, it can't arrange for the signals coming out of them all to equal the signals going in.

I suppose I should say explicitly that

the circuitry at bottom left is testing exactly that, as described in humn's answer.

It's not clear to me, though,

what the rightmost part of the annotation means. If the rightmost symbol were a 6, it could signify something like "... input of size 6", but boboquack has already indicated that it isn't. [EDITED to add: oops, no he hasn't; in fact he conspicuously didn't, and it turns out it was a 6 and meant pretty much exactly that.]

As for the application in physics,

there are a number of things in physics with this sort of flavour. It might for instance point at Liouville's theorem on conservation of phase-space volume, or maybe something to do with the second law of thermodynamics.

Source Link

created Jan 31, 2017 at 14:56

Gareth McCaughan ♦

121.9k
7
320
464

The key thing seems to be that

there are only five (not six) connections between the two boxes on the right; some information is necessarily lost on the way around.

So perhaps

the yellow thing at the bottom is an LED or similar, and the annotation says "this-thing-on-the-left not lit-up for-all inputs". In other words, whatever you put into the boxes, it can't arrange for the signals coming out of them all to equal the signals going in.

I suppose I should say explicitly that

the circuitry at bottom left is testing exactly that, as described in humn's answer.

It's not clear to me, though,

what the rightmost part of the annotation means. If the rightmost symbol were a 6, it could signify something like "... input of size 6", but boboquack has already indicated that it isn't.

As for the application in physics,

there are a number of things in physics with this sort of flavour. It might for instance point at Liouville's theorem on conservation of phase-space volume, or maybe something to do with the second law of thermodynamics.