5 ms·

Street Fighting Mathematics: The art of educated guessing

• jimmyjim 15y ago
  Previous discussions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1548013 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1548013 (many comments) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1106846 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1106846 (2 comments) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2873902 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2873902 (no comments)
  • ColinWright 15y ago
    Erm, that last is this very item - so when you wrote that it had one comment, and now has at least two.
    • personalcompute 15y ago
      He doesn't appear to be a bot either. Hey, someone should make a bot that indicates previous discussions on reposts.
      • epochwolf 15y ago
        It's been done: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2013666 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2013666
      • duck 15y ago
        That was tried before - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2013666 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2013666
• wmat 15y ago
  For a duplicate post, it's sure been on the FrontPage for a long time.
• xyzzyz 15y ago
  I glanced through "easy cases", and the "guessing the solution" part looks more like "we somehow magically know that the solution is among these 3 or 5 possibilities, now we eliminate obviously wrong answers and lo, we found a solution". Seriously, just look at the treatment of Gaussian integral. They wonder if the solution is sqrt(pi alpha) or sqrt(pi/alpha). Then they rule out the first possibility. Yeah, that's fine, but why sqrt and pi at all? Why not sin and e? Or gamma function and ... oh well this actually is a gamma function, but nevermind. Guessing is easy, if you already know the solution.