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The National Cipher Challenge

Turtles all the way down …

At a loose end now you have cracked challenge 4? Or need a break from trying? Why not head over to Quanta magazine to learn how Chat GPT works. (Spoiler -it’s maths!)

For some reason I can’t quite fathom, it brings to mind the quote from Stephen Hawking’s “Brief History of Time”

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

We all know, of course, that it is Mathematics all the way down.

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