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Re:Computer Scientists Discover Limits of Gradient Descent by BorisTheBrave on Sunday July 30, 2023 @05:16AM (#36929350)
A better example I've seen for the theorem is that if you take a paper map of a country, messily schrunch it up into a ball and drop it somewhere in the country, there will be at least one point on the map that is exactly above the corresponding real point in the country.

As others have said, it's meant for mappings of the space to itself. So stirring the water, but not moving the glass.

But anyway, the theorem works only for continiuous mappings. The moment they started mentioning "water particles", instead of some hypothetical fluid that is a continuous block, the theorem no longer applied. You could break it by mirroring the position of every particle. There's still a fixed point (the line of mirroring), but there's no obligation that there's a particle on that line.

Re:Computer Scientists Discover Limits of Gradient Descent by chacham15 on Sunday July 30, 2023 @10:39AM (#36931588)
This still doesnt make sense to me. Imagine a continuous line whose positions map to the real numbers between 0 and 1. If I "move" the line over 0.1 wrapping the end back to the beginning (i.e. x2 = (x1 + 0.1) % 1), there will be no points that are in the same position as they were in before.
Re:Computer Scientists Discover Limits of Gradient Descent by frutiger on Sunday July 30, 2023 @10:42AM (#36931626)
The theorem only applies to continuous functions.
Re:Computer Scientists Discover Limits of Gradient Descent by contravariant on Sunday July 30, 2023 @10:51AM (#36931715)
Brouwer's fixed point theorem only applies to compact convex sets.

Infinite lines don't work, as they are not compact.

Similarly a circle would not work as it is not convex (you're close with your example, you just need to glue together the endpoints to turn it into a circle and make the map continuous).

Re:Computer Scientists Discover Limits of Gradient Descent by d_tr on Sunday July 30, 2023 @05:41PM (#36936300)
The line example is what I thought and then I looked the theorem up in Wikipedia. Thanks for pointing this out.
Re:Computer Scientists Discover Limits of Gradient Descent by drc500free on Sunday July 30, 2023 @01:27PM (#36933621)
Another practical example is that you're guaranteed to have an annoying spot on your head where the hair sticks straight out and you can't brush it down.

That's actually the one that helped me visualize the theorem. If you look at your scalp from above, you can divide all the hairs into "points left" or "points right" and draw a boundary between them of hairs that point neither left or right. Then you can do the same thing with "points up" and "points down." Where the two kinds of boundaries cross, you have a hair that doesn't point up, down, left, or right - it points straight out of your scalp.