16 Mar
2016
16 Mar
'16
6:14 p.m.
-- more precisely, I think the phrase I was looking for is "masterpieces of sadism."
In problem C, it was somewhat mysterious what Conway had meant by "distinguishable even though I've never been able to tell left from right."
I imagined Conway meant: "the action of O(3) -- not SO(3) -- on the configuration of rings is 2-transitive but not 3-transitive." That is to say, if you can distinguish chirality then SO(3) is the natural group of symmetries; otherwise, one can only identify configurations up to the action of O(3). Best wishes, Adam P. Goucher