Or you could just walk to room infinity + 1 and not disturb an infinite number of guests, dick.
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
486 points (98.8% liked)
Comic Strips
19895 readers
2220 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- AI-generated comics aren't allowed.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
But it would take an infinite amount of time to get there!
The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.
.... Well, better get to walking.
We are not talking about a thousand miles but infinite miles. That's not the same order of magnitude at all but a factor of infinity
Well you're definitely not going to get there if you spend all day explaining infinity to people.
Don't worry, I spend a finite amount of time doing it
Eh, I’ll get there the same time whether I leave now or tomorrow.
Is it better to inconvenience one person an infinite amount, or an infinite amount of people a medium amount?
I feel like my odds of avoiding getting my ass kicked are better inconveniencing just one person.
I'll get Zeno to shoot arrows at you to motivate you.
You can't actually. If there's an infinite number of rooms and infinite guests occupying them then there are no open rooms.
Next-best strategy: make the set of guests who have to be moved arbitrarily sparse, so that 0% of the hotel's guests need to be bothered. Oh dear, that's still infinity of them.
This is a great plan, but it is critical to not be the person to notify each guest. Infinite calls to inconvenience infinite people sounds like hell.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Depends on the size of the infinities. If you have an infinite natural number of guests, but infinite real number of rooms, then you have more rooms than guests.
If you can see doors to enter each room, then they are countable.
How do you know the uncountable doors aren't there? You wouldn't be able to see them amyway
How would anyone get into one of those free, uncountable rooms if they can't see them.
Ever opened a door with the light off?
Yes, since I have hands to feel the door. Hands which, incidentally, are able to help me count things they touch :)
Okay, automatic doors with perfectly precise sensors based on shifts in gravity.
A single portal into all the different rooms might work if you are ok with your continuous room-choosing mechanism having a probability of zero to get you into your chosen room. Not a problem as long as you take everying with you since the probability of hitting some empty room is of course still one.
What about upon entering a room a new normal door is then constructed, allowing re-entry?
Wrong: ∞±n = ∞
The concept of infinity is well-defined in mathematics. It goes much deeper than that, with countability and differently-sized infinities, but if there are infinite rooms, you always have space.
Yes, but walking down the hallway you'll never find an open room. Space can be made but you can't just go to the ∞+1 room.
You can also just ask the staff to change the room numbers and send everyone an update. That way you get a room, no one is disturbed and people running the hotel have an infinite amount of work to do!
This is actually an issue caused by the hotel staff not allocating their rooms efficiently. When the first wave of infinite guests showed up, they should have assigned them to odd numbered rooms. Then theres still an infinite number of vacant even numbered rooms.
Even if several more waves of infinite guests show up, you can assign them to rooms numbered 4n+2, 8n+4, 16n+8…
That way, the hotel will always have rooms left over.
Heresy! The staff should assign the initial wave of guests to EVEN numbered rooms with a dark chocolate on their pillow. Future assignments must be to 4n+1, 8n+3, 16n+5...
Your heretical tyrany of the highest order will be purged. Only the pure must survive.
Nah they should have just assigned them to every prime room
0/5 stars. We stayed here for an infinite amount of time over the holiday. Every 10 minutes the staff moved us to a different room! We didn't even get a chance to unpack our infinite luggage.
Ah there he is hiding. Disguised with diaper and sock.
I like how this gif loops, so it looks like he's spitting back into the bottle.
Ugh, getting everybody moved will take forever!
Considering this simple case, it will take just the time for the slowest guest to move to the next room as they can all take their luggage and move to the next room that should be vacant by the time they reach it.
However, this is considering a magic comms system that lets all guest know to move a room instantly. In the case this is not available, the speed of light is the limiter and then it takes forever.
Using the case with instantaneous communication, it is possible to take forever by trying to host a countable infinite amount of people as this is usually done by moving the original guests to the room that is double the current one and the new guests to each odd number left. In this situation, the original guests will take forever as for bigger numbers, the guests have to move more and more rooms each time.
Sorry for the rant, I've seen too many Hilbert hotel videos
load more comments
(1 replies)
This isn't even unexpected. Once a person unwilling to change room is in first position, they stay there and considering that those people exist, this will happen eventually in the Infinite Hotel
But couldn't you just skip the room if that happens? Eventually somebody will be willing to change rooms.
Until the second room is also occupied by someone like this. And the third and the fourth... It's just a question of time
Yeah, as long as there's an infinite number of people willing to move, it'll work.
Just go to the infinite plus one room. no need for everyone to shift.
Long walk and it's nowhere near the ice machine.
I understand the idea behind this, but I always felt that it was a flawed concept.
Maybe my understanding of complex math is limited…but I’m gonna keep pretending I’m smarter than everyone while I enjoy life in my delusional kingdom.
Also this reminds me of the question “can god create a boulder so big that he can’t lift it?”
The concept of infinity is to mathematicians as god is to Christians.
EDIT: the above two statements were the jokey part of my answer, I thought it would be obvious but I guess not. ƪ(˘⌣˘)ʃ
The comparison doesn't work. Maths are abstract, you don't "believe" in it. You build a consistent theory with minimum assumptions (axioms) and if something stops being consistent, it means some of your assumptions don't work and you need to change them to build a better theory. Maths is an abstract tool, not a representation of reality.
Infinity is just a concept you can define. There are tools to demonstrate something is true over an infinite space and obviously, you need those for a lot of basic maths. You're not going to go anywhere in basic arithmetic or geometry if you can't prove anything works over the infinite set of numbers or the infinite space.
Furthermore, while mathematicians admit that math is entirely man-made construct, which is also the reason we have irrational constant, christian do no such thing.
Imaginary numbers are a perfect example of that. It's basically just "Okay, in the common number theory, you can't get the square root of a negative number. What if you could?". And what do you know, you can build a consistent theory where square root of -1 exists, and it has surprising properties.
Intuitively, good luck trying to make sense of it. But it doesn't matter, it works, and it's useful to build other stuff. That in turn can be used as modelling tools in physics and all.
I think it makes sense intuitively. It's just most of us aren't really trained since childhood to work with inaginary numbers. Sure, it's not a 1:1 mapping to your fingers, but it's not that unintuitive. Like when I do certain calculations I go into a second dimension of numbers where I can move around just as in the first dimension, because those calculations are outside of our current physical reality.
I say current as if our reality will change somehow somewhen lol.
Infinity is effectively just bullshit.
I'm fond of pointing out to my students that there's a very practical reason to care about "infinity" in math:
While nothing ever reaches "infinity", things absolutely do reach a point where they violently fly to pieces and catch on fire.
So I teach my students to substitute the phrase "explodes and catches on fire" where they see an equation that "approaches infinity".
I find it helps them pay attention to a subject that is otherwise bullshit. Infinity itself is bullshit, but it has a place in math: telling us when to quickly duck behind a good solid oak table.
I bet you are a great teacher.
Oh, and Ensign? Tea. Earl Grey, hot.
Like hell I’m moving.
That's the infidel hotel across the street
view more: next ›