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A brief meditation on formal systems and lying goblins


The other day I came across some people on The Internet talking about a certain scene from Labyrinth, which is a movie from the 80s (if you haven't seen it you should - lavish musical numbers, very unsettling Jim Henson puppetry, David Bowie doing contact juggling in spandex, it's really

The other day I came across some people on The Internet talking about a certain scene from Labyrinth, which is a movie from the 80s (if you haven't seen it you should - lavish musical numbers, very unsettling Jim Henson puppetry, David Bowie doing contact juggling in spandex, it's really got it all!) I wanted to post about it because I think this is a case where a formal approach can be a lot more straightforward then working through the problem in plain English. There was little discussion as to the broader "nature" of the problem vis-a-vis the real world, and we ended up unlocking the solution by noticing a few key properties of the \(xor\) operator (as opposed to talking through hypotheticals, as Sarah did.)

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