Talk:1545: Strengths and Weaknesses

For anyone who wants to take a stab at a more thorough (or better written) explanation of ancestry, the wiki pages for Identical_ancestors_point and Most_recent_common_ancestor helped me to start understanding the topic. I think its easy to jump to the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that Cueball will be the ancestor of all living humans, however it isn't quite as intuitive as I believed. --Pudder (talk) 16:17, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

Look at the talk for that Wikipedia page. The figures for most recent common ancestor given there are incredible, but the community lacks the will to replace with decent science. Asimong (talk) 05:57, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

I don't understand, why would come a day that he is "either an ancestor to all living humans, or to none of them"? It's very possible for him to be the ancestor to some living humans forever Egoist (talk) 19:44, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

If you have lots of children, and then if people interbreed randomly, as time goes forward it becomes less and less likely that any randomly selected person is not one of your descendents. As probability of not goes to zero, fraction of yes goes to 100%. But, if you do not have lots of children, and your kids don't either, at some future moment you may have zero descendents, and after that statistics cannot save you. Pesthouse (talk) 22:36, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

Two cases that haven't been dealt with: 1.) Humanity gets wiped out before this happens, so there are no living humans for Cueball to be ancestor to tor not. (0/0 case)

2.) Through physical separation, humanity diverges into 2 or more species, and Cueball is only an ancestor to some of these different species. Would all of these species be considered humans? I'm not familiar with the semantics.

I'm also not sure how likely either of these are.108.162.215.100 20:29, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

In your case (1), that means he will *both* be the ancestor to all people or to none. MGK (talk) 01:21, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Also! Assuming Cueball hasn't had kids yet, he is already an ancestor to no living humans. 108.162.215.100 23:47, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

In this comic it is very likely that Cueball is confused regarding the software concept of recursion and "children" or child nodes. This plays off of the idea that if he reproduces he will eventually become a common ancestor to all existing humans at some point in the future (infinte recursion), or he won't reproduce and therefore will have no children (ancestor to none). This is further played with in the subtext which mentions implementing quick sort (a recursive sorting algorithm). Also of note, there are many other comics where cueball is confused by software concepts. 108.162.219.111 21:11, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

I added a bit to this explanation. I think the explanation as it was dealt too heavily with the existential portion of the exchange and missed one really important part of the joke: Ponytail's questions are meant to be related to Cueball's PROFESSIONAL strengths and weaknesses (and his ambitions), but his responses are either accidentally or deliberately "missing the point" - he's responding from an existential point of view instead of a professional one. I hope that the portion of the explanation I added will help clarify this point. KieferSkunk (talk) 05:58, 4 July 2015 (UTC)