Bec was at Edinburgh Festival Fringe, but not as a performer. While there, she stayed with the guys from Mr Thing. One of them, Gus, gave Bec a grappling hook as a gift. It's like a big dangerous fidget toy
Matt went to Finland to a maths art conference called Bridges. One cool thing was about randomly generated knitting patterns.
Matt is hoping to extend the slinky staircase world record. For this purpose, he's looking for a set stairs without a landing and about 100 steps. While in Finland, he measured a candidate set of stairs. Another candidate set of stairs exists on Saint Helena, but it's hard to get to. Matt asks the listeners to send in candidates if they come across any. If anybody builds one, Matt promises to come there.
At what point does a plate become a bowl? They have a bowl that their family claims is a plate. A similar question has been asked a bit later by someone called Patrick.
[Editor's note: The problem starts with some editing mistakes.] Bec proposes the soup test: If it holds soup and you can scoop it out with a spoon, then it's a bowl. However, then she presents a soup plate. Matt proposes an area based test: Ignoring rims, if there's more slope area than flat area, it's a bowl. Matt proposes another test where a bowl's curvature must change while a plate consists of straight parts. Bec dismantles Matt's proposals using counter examples. Bec wil do a poll; the problem will stay undinged for now.
Bec did some etymology research: The word "plate" comes from plates of armour. The word "bowl" ultimately means "round".
Matt's code took 32 days on his laptop. Approximately one day later, Benjamin Paaßen sent in code that took 15 minutes. Benjamin built a graph of words with no common letters, and then used some graph theory to search it for K5 subgraphs. While that was happening, Neil Coffey wrote some Java code that took only 15 seconds. After the video released, a frenzy of solutions poured in. At the time of recording, the record is approximately 2 ms.
Benjamin downloaded and benchmarked all the solutions, analyzed them, and created a ranking. The single greatest improvement was storing words as numbers instead of sets, reminiscent of the approach from problem 036-1.
It also turns out that people first asked the same question, called the Jotto problem back then, in 1986. In 1996 it was revisited, and someone found the exact same solution as Matt did and published it in a paper.
People then adapted the code to incorporate words of any length to cover the alphabet in as few words as possible. They rediscovered the combination of words "blacksmith" and "gunpowdery", which cover 20 letters. They also discovered "showjumping" and "veldcraft" as a brand new such combination, with no letters in common. Matt proposes listeners come up with two words that sound like words with more than 20 letters in common and send them in. Matt and Bec will then assign meanings to those words.
Extra dings from Bec
Matt misses the "Is this your card" segment. Bec opens an already-open packet of stale NikNaks (from South Africa) that went off in May 2017. Matt smells (a very mild smell) and Bec tastes (flavour's not bad, very greasy). Listeners are encouraged to send fresh snacks.