On 24/02/2008, Chaddaï Fouché <chaddai.fouche@gmail.com> wrote:

2008/2/24, Rodrigo Queiro <overdrigzed@gmail.com>:

> 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