Miinimumini

Miinimumini is a fictional term used in science-fiction and puzzle-writing communities to describe a robust, modular minimum-finding device and the algorithm it implements. In the imagined setting, miinimumini can extract a stable minimum value from a set of measurements that may be noisy, incomplete, or perturbed by external factors.

Etymology and usage: The name fuses the word minimum with a reduplicated suffix, a stylistic convention in some fan glossaries intended to convey compactness and resilience. The concept appears in fan-created encyclopedias, short stories, and puzzle collections rather than in real-world mathematics.

Mechanism: The miinimumini device maintains a short history of recent readings and applies a tolerance parameter ε. It returns the smallest observed value that remains within ε of all readings in the window, effectively smoothing out outliers and small fluctuations. In practice, it behaves like a standard minimum when the data are stable, but it resists shifting to a new minimum due to minor noise.

Applications and impact: In fiction, miinimumini serves as a plot device to illustrate issues of precision, reliability, and measurement, and as a tool for designing challenges in puzzles and games. It is also used in world-building to explain why characters rely on robust sensors in uncertain environments.

See also: minimum, robustness, outlier, robust statistics, reduplication in fiction.