What really puzzles me is that while Dan referred to the sporting spirit of PE, this really doesn't seem to be a spirit embodied by many of the users. Reading through the forum will reveal the first few posts to be of the form "wrote a crappy brute force solver for the first few terms, searched OEIS, 'solved'". I really don't understand why someone would do that.
On 24/02/2008, Chaddaï Fouché <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 2008/2/24, Rodrigo Queiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > The only time I have found the solutions page useful is when I was > working > > on problem 100, which I'd been thinking about on and off for several > months. > > Eventually, I gave up and looked at the solution there, and was > absolutely > > none the wiser as to how it was solved! I thought about it more over the > > next few months, and eventually just copied and ran that program, put it > > into PE, and looked at the forum, and finally understood how I should > have > > solved the problem. > > > > Without the solutions page, I would probably never have been able to > solve > > the problem, and would know even less about Diophantine Equations than I > > currently do. However, the only value was the actual numerical solution, > > since when I have solved a problem myself and want to see if my answer > could > > be improved, I just look in the forum where I can see a range of methods > of > > solution instead of just one. > > > > That said, I vote to keep the solutions (providing they are written by > the > > page editor) since IMO they do no harm. > > > I agree with this (I personally contributed some small solutions and > tried to at least comment them a minimum), but I noticed a smartass > replaced valid solutions by references to the sequences dictionary... > As the goal of PE is to solve the question by program (at least in my > understanding), I feel this qualify as vandalism... especially as the > program replaced whatever their value were in Haskell whereas the > sequence dictionary has no relation to Haskell. > > Otherwise I don't see where the fact that this page exists is in any > way harmful or unsporting, I never looked it up before solving a > question by myself but have found it valuable to check my solution > against. > > > -- > Jedaï >
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