Anthony Wang
369488603f
2.2 KiB
| title | date | draft | description | type | tags | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unfactoring | 2023-03-19T01:03:35Z | true | The final story in a long saga of nonsense | post |
|
This is a sequel to Azerbaijan
Kelvin stood there horrified in the MIT dining hall, transfixed on the gruesome corpse of a Gaussian integer that had been factored one too many times. It was a revolting, esoteric scene, but no one other than Kelvin seemed to care. Didn't they understand the gravity of the situation?
Gaussian integers are complex numbers of the form a+bi, where a and b are integers. They are named after the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who created new and ingenious ways to torture Gaussian integers. But even Gauss couldn't have imagined the brutal fate that had befallen this innocent Gaussian integer.
"Rig crashes dance number."
The words entering Kelvin's ear twisted his brain like a crochet pattern. Kelvin knew this dining hall defied the basic laws of absurdity. As an MIT undergrad and dining hall connoisseur, he had seen it all, including the Great Oyster Cracker Extinction event and the segfaulting bananas. But this was different. He could taste it.
"Leave the complex immediately."
What? Kelvin looked around for the source of the voice or the cause for evacuation, but he saw neither a rig nor dance number.
"Place the world Seattle."
Seattle? That was thousands of kilometers away! What a world.
"Exterminate the violet cup."
Violent cup? Oh wait, violet cup. Well, that doesn't make it any better.
Suddenly, Kelvin saw straight through the madness. Diagonalization! The set of real numbers is uncountable!
Kelvin turned around, bringing him face-to-face with the sinister progenitor of the chaos, but all he saw was an adorable Pallas's cat.
"Mwahahahaha!" cackled the Pallas's cat, "Too bad you can't unfactor numbers!"
"Wait... yeah I can!" Kelvin replied, "That's just multiplication! It's solvable in polynomial time!"
"What???" screamed the Pallas's cat horrified, "But we've been relying on the extreme difficulty of unfactoring numbers for encrypting our top-secret communication! Now everyone will find out that Kazakhstan has been conspiring to rig the World Cup bidding process!"
"Wait what???"