2008/2/24, Rodrigo Queiro
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