Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

discrete

2023-11-14 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
discrete
Votey panel for discrete
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic shows three people stranded on a life raft in the ocean, facing the classic survival dilemma of who gets sacrificed so the others can survive. One person -- apparently a mathematician -- objects to framing it as a binary "win-or-lose" situation, asking: "But why does it have to be a discrete win-or-lose game when the prizes could be sliced up almost indefinitely?"

The caption delivers the punchline: "Ultimately, instead of drawing straws, we just ate the mathematician." The humor works on multiple levels. "Discrete" mathematics deals with distinct, countable values (like win/lose outcomes), while the mathematician is arguing for a continuous distribution of outcomes. But his suggestion to "slice up the prizes indefinitely" has a horrifying double meaning in the context of a survival cannibalism scenario -- he's inadvertently suggesting that a person could be divided into portions rather than making a binary choice of who lives and dies. The others apparently took this suggestion literally.

View History (1) Original Comic
← Previous Comic Next Comic →