Aptitude: A Tor.com Original by Cooper Shrivastava
My rating: 4/5 cats
She spun the radius she had created through all the positions and let n spin out into infinity. They were in a simulation beyond reconciling time and space, so the set immediately sat in her palm, and when she licked a fingertip and pressed it to (0,0) she could lift it off the disk like a wheel with infinite spokes.
Perfect.
Together the set of all spokes of the wheel and the set of all points in the circle that were not spokes made up the entire unit disk. Alena rotated the spokes clockwise, so that a new spoke appeared. She had cut the disk into two pieces, moved one of them, and now had the original set plus an extra spoke, all within the simple mathematical rules that the candidate had agreed to.
She redrew the triangles so that the ratio of their sides was equivalent to the ratio of their sum over the longest side, which made them glow golden. She overlaid these on the rhombuses, which she sorted into thick and thin shapes. The golden half of each thin rhombus could be laid next to the golden half of each thick rhombus so that their sides were aligned left to right. The shapes reformed themselves along this matching rule, which allowed unbounded expansion.
1:00–2:00: Lunch
this story made me feel dumb, but i’m used to that. i liked that parts that weren’t casting their math/physics/cosmology/cosmogony before the swine of me. however, in general, i think sabotage is rude and should not be rewarded. be better at proctoring, proctors!
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2021/08/04/aptitu…
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