Talk:2313: Wrong Times Table

Such an illogical table. Smaller numbers multiply to larger answers than larger numbers? Even numbers multiply to odd numbers?! How?!?! What sort of illiterate alien declared this to be the multiplication table?! 108.162.221.101 20:54, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

This is easily one of the worst XKCD comics, period. Not funny, nor clever. Just seems like noise. 172.69.68.183 20:57, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

I suspect Randall may have just been feeling random, perhaps after several months of mostly Coronavirus-related comics. Barmar (talk) 21:13, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

That's fair, I'm being a bit harsh, but this just comes across as exceptionally meaningless and contrived, so much so that I felt the need to come here and comment immediately for the first time ever 172.69.71.56 21:18, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

I relate to certain mathematical facts not sounding right, like how 54 intuitively feels like it's divisible by 4. Nonsensical, but makes sense anyway. 162.158.62.233 21:42, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

This seems like the multiplication equivalent of looking at a word and thinking it is spelled incorrectly. Sometimes I look at a simple word like "fish" and think: "That can't be right." Sometimes multiplication can feel that way, particularly 7's because those were tricky for some reason. The alt text confirms fishiness with 7's 108.162.246.173 21:09, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

Is it weird that I don't get this? I have this sense of "that is obviously wrong" when it comes to multiplication of small numbers like these, even with sevens and eights. If I read that 7 * 8 = 54, my brain screams "NOOOOOOOOO IT IS 56 YOU IDIOT!". 108.162.221.101 21:14, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

Well, 2,2 that's actually 2^3=8. 2,3 is addition instead of multiplication. 1,2 is division instead of multiplication. 1,1 is subtraction. 10,10 seems to be a visual gag, though most of the 10s row is either multiplication by 11 or 12... There's some logic to some of these, but it's different for each row, column, or cell. 162.158.74.167 21:13, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, there is something going on. It looks like a lot of it is remembering the correct answer to a different problem. By my count 55 squares are the correct answer to a square next to it and 31 have a correct answer for somewhere else on the grid. Also, 2*2, 4*4 and 5*5 are double the correct answer.108.162.245.76 21:41, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

It's almost disappointing that he didn't hide one or two asymmetries in there just to throw us off! 108.162.216.114 22:04, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

I get the idea that this is the sort of table you'd get if you tried to train an Adversarial AI from scratch to determine x*y purely by stocastic guessing and comparing to a co-evolving 'scorer' that also starts off naively but supports each answer according to the 'rightness' it thinks it has except for the real answer which is always hard-coded to be down-scored. (Also noting that DA reportedly came by his choice of 42 by asking people which numbers were 'funnier' than others, which can be said to be a similar kind of process but without the arrayed "original multiplication" element.) 162.158.158.179 22:13, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

As someone who often confuses 7*8 as 54, I found the alt text very humorous. 172.69.34.118 22:29, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

I'm disappointed to see that 6*9 isn't equal to 42. Probably not Douglas Hofstadter (talk) 23:01, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

This is just a collection of equations with the wrong answers. I'm not sure who finds this funny. 108.162.219.96 00:33, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1210:_I%27m_So_RandomOverlord of oddities (talk) 01:16, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

I have asked a Code Golf Stack Exchange question with the goal of producing the shortest program that computes this function. Aaron Rotenberg (talk) 02:29, 30 May 2020 (UTC) @Aaron I had a similar thought, but was going to settle for the generator function for the main diagonal. If we can come up with one, we should submit it to https://oeis.org/ Cellocgw (talk) 13:30, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

I'm disappointed that 17 does not show up in any product cell, seeing as I've known since at least 1970 that 17 is the world's most random number. <-- a fact proved for a limited case here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JPSJL7Kvus Cellocgw (talk) 13:35, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

I too was unimpressed with this... unitl I got to the alt text. I'm in my sixties now, and for some reason, 8*7 has ALWAYS been difficult for me. I find myself always doube-checking to make sure I did it right. And 6*7 gave me problems too, but I got over that a few decades ago. I wonder what it is about those that gave us trouble.