The prequel to the ‘A Quiet Place’ saga got me thinking.

spoiler alert!

There is a scene in which many humans march towards a safety point. Each individual human would have been relatively quiet, but because there are a lot of them (potentially hundreds), they end up being, as a whole, loud enough to alert the monsters so they get all killed.

This would suggest that many sources of noise which are near to each other and generate more or less the same amount of noise end up adding up so that the end result in dB is more or less the sum of the individual dB levels.

But then again, it’s fiction.

Back to reality, I work in a room full of different servers which have also very different levels of noise. I have noticed that from my standpoint, the noise of the quietest server seems to disappear whenever the loudest is running, so it kind of does blow my mind how our perception of noise works…

  • Andy
    2•3 days ago

    Can you demonstrate how you would have composed the question?

    • @oo1@lemmings.worldEnglish
      2•2 days ago

      Not the one you asked but - I thought it read more like an exam question than a crapgpt question.

      It is this part that rubbed me the wrong way: “Please provide formulas and an example.”

      That’s like the part where the examiner is giving a hints about how the marks will be awarded.

      Either way here’s my equation: P(Answer | Question and constraint on answer ) < P(Answer | Question)

      I assume that’s the OOPs intention though; to block out some of the noise from the responses. I only see one formula so far (excluding my stupid one) so I’m not sure if it worked strictly, but I’d be surprised it it hasn’t filtered out some answers.