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Francesco Cordella

Publications and source records attributed to Francesco Cordella.

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Odd denominators in the Lonely Runner spectrum for six speeds

For distinct positive integers v_1, ..., v_n let ML(v_1, ..., v_n) be the largest number L such that at some time t every t vi is at distance at least L from the nearest integer; the Lonely Runner Conjecture asserts that ML >= 1/(n+1). Write ML = p/q in lowest terms. Kravitz conjectured that whenever ML < 1/n one has q = np + 1; Fan and Sun found counterexamples for n = 4, conjectured that q = np + k with 1 <= k <= n always holds, and observed that in their data for n = 6 only k = 1 and k = 3 occur. We explain this observation. For six speeds we show that all but finitely many tuples with ML < 1/6 satisfy ML = (P-1)/(6P) for an integer P congruent to 1 or 5 modulo 6; in particular k is 1 or 3 and the denominator q is odd. The proof determines the three infinite two-parameter families of tuples on which such values concentrate, computes ML exactly on each family, and describes exactly where k = 3 occurs. An exhaustive search over the 2 x 10^9 sextuples with speeds at most 110 finds no exception. For five speeds the same method, together with Chen's classification of the tuples attaining ML = 1/5, shows that all but finitely many tuples with ML < 1/5 satisfy Kravitz's original conjecture. The computations are exact and the code is provided.

math.NT

Intercepting the Kangaroo: Experimental Astrolinguistics with Constructed Lexicons, Active Probing, and Large Language Models as Informants and Hypothesis Proposers

Astrolinguistics -- communication with minds that categorize reality differently from ours -- has been purely speculative since Freudenthal's Lincos (1960). We make it experimental. Two language models with deliberately incompatible constructed lexicons (one encoding shape, color, and motion; the other fusing color with motion, encoding parity, and lacking shape) serve as informants with complete ground truth, while a fully scripted orchestrator translates between the two category systems. The central failure mode is the kangaroo effect: the silent attachment of a word to the wrong referent -- Quine's indeterminacy of translation, operationalized. Across 400+ simulated and live runs, a protocol combining cross-situational elimination, pre-registered predictive probes, active scene selection, a stricter recovery round, and quarantine produced no undetected mistranslations under the tested conditions and exceeded a passive baseline's coverage (d = 0.62). Injected kangaroo traps defeated naive ostension and pure statistical learning in 100% of runs, while the full protocol intercepted every decoy and, where discriminating evidence is ontologically unavailable, declared Quinean equivalence classes instead of guessing. Under informant noise it degrades gracefully: zero kangaroos persist up to 2% per-word noise; at 10% the protocol predominantly abstains rather than errs. Finally, words outside the scripted hypothesis space (a history-dependent relational term and an XOR contextual homonym) are recovered by a generate-and-test loop in which an LLM proposes rules and the script verifies them: coverage scales with proposer capability (0% -> 18% -> 72% -> 100%) while undetected mistranslations stayed at zero throughout. In the tested conditions, correctness is a property of the protocol; coverage is a property of the instruments.

cs.CL