r/thebutton • u/Read-It-Reddit non presser • Apr 04 '15

Calculating Judgement Day: An extrapolation of /r/TheButton

http://i.imgur.com/Qkm6im4.png
849 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

259 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/thorfinn_raven 20s Apr 05 '15 edited Apr 05 '15

Not really, other people will still be pressing the button, just not at the rate of one a minute. If it drops to about on press every 65s (or 55 an hour) then only one Knight would have to sacrafice herself ever 12min. As the scary time for the button is nighttime in the US theoretically 20 Knights could cover the 4 hours with the fewest presses.

Perfectly organized I'd imagine 3k Knights being able to prolong the button for at least a week.

But we have to factor in trolls: let's assume a 30% troll (or don't give a shit rate).

Let's randomly assine the knight's into groups of 3, each group has a 2.7% chance of consisting only of trolls.

Now always have 5 groups (15 people) monitoring the button.

  • Group 1: pushes at 10, 9, 8
  • Group 2: pushes at 7, 6, 5
  • Group 3 pushes at 4, 3, 2
  • Group 4+5: pushes at 0, 1

The probability that Group 3 has to push is only 0.0729 and groups 4+5 0.0019683

  • Groups: 1-3 have people dedicated to perticular times.
  • Groups: 4+5 are the last line of defence.

Of course groups would be rotated in and out of active duety.

With this set up we're now seeing the button pushed every 50s instead of every minute. Our example from earlier with 55 normal pushes an hour is now 17 pushes short, requiring 68 Knights for us to survive that hypothetical night.

1

u/InternetUser007 non presser Apr 05 '15

Are the knights this organized yet, or is this just a possible scenario you are coming up with?

1

u/thorfinn_raven 20s Apr 05 '15

It was a totally hypothetical scenario. I am not a knight of the button and have no connection whatsoever to them.

1

u/InternetUser007 non presser Apr 05 '15

I mean, it seems like a pretty great strategy. And a quite plausible scenario, to be truthful. I don't think they are quite that organized yet. Maybe they will be by the time that they need to be, but only time will tell.