What kind of math problems are they solving? Is it used for anything? Why are they doing it?
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You own a magic box and people give you photocopies of their signed cheques. You take a bunch of signed cheques, and put them in the magic box. You also include a cheque that creates money to your account just in case you win.
The magic box has a keyboard. Every time you guess a number in the keyboard, the magic box spits out a random number. If the random number meets some criteria, you can tell the other magic box owners that you found a solution. The criteria is that it must be a very very small number, so you need to guess many times before you are able to get a solution that meets the criteria.
There are other magic box owners are out there receiving the same photocopies of cheques. If one magic box owner finds a solution, they tell everyone the number that they guessed. It is easy for other magic box owners to verify that the solution because it takes a second to type it in. Everyone acknowledges the signed cheques inside the box is now legit.
Everyone now works on a the next magic box. This time, the magic box will contain a copy of the previous magic box along with any newly signed cheques that haven’t been included. This keeps on going until you have a magic box inside a magic box inside a magic box etc.
In the real world everything is digital so it’s easy to have a chain where you remove a single signed cheque to undo a payment. But since the boxes are inside each other, if you change anything inside any box, it would affect the random output of the box, making it no longer satisfy the condition and become invalid.
To see how much money you have, simply ask around for the chain of boxes. Some people will give you the wrong chain, but it likely won’t be very long since they need to spend a lot of energy to guess a bunch of numbers to make a valid chain. It takes you far less time to verify than it takes for them to guess. Eventually you will find a chain that is very very long, which is likely the chain everyone agrees on because a lot of energy was used to create it.
To see how much money u have, simply add up the cheques sent to you minus the cheques you sent out.
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