JUST 3 MORE DIGESTS...
Jul. 17th, 2003 07:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoyDue to the fact that I like to have everything on my HD, I'm not writing any Oracularities while at PROMYS. I suppose that means the average quality of Oracularities just went up a few notches.
Today's problem set has 26 problems. A whole bunch of reasonably hard ones, followed by the evil "Miscellaneous", which, as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jonpin has pointed out, we are not really supposed to do. Well, except for the one telling us to find the number of units in Z15, obviously.
Bizarre slip-up: Intending to write Z3[x], I instead wrote Z3[3]. How that would work, I don't know.
See if you can find anything strange about the horribly evil problem 26, the 17-variable polynomialjonpin mentioned:
Some people were wondering what the largest named/used number was today, and decided to look this up on Mathworld. It's Graham's Number, so far as we can tell, but more importantly, looking at the links from this, we found the Frivolous Theorem of Arithmetic. Wow.
For whatever reason, Labs 1 and 3 have been swapped. Our own lab, Error-Correcting Codes Group 1, has joined forces with Group 2 to create a group that is even more argumentative than before. Lab today essentially consisted of people writing down equations, throwing those equations out, writing new equations, giving examples, generalizing, scrapping the generalizations, waving pieces of paper at each other, drawing diagrams with lots of 1s and 0s on the board, arguing about efficiency, trying to evaluate weird limits, failing to evaluate weird limits, arguing that we needed to add more bits for a certain method, claiming that it was okay that we needed more bits somewhere since we saved enough bits by using this method that we could afford to put in a few extra, and using inconsistent variables and terminology to add to the confusion. And worse, I was in it.
I might have more to say now but I really have to go to the bathroom.
Today's problem set has 26 problems. A whole bunch of reasonably hard ones, followed by the evil "Miscellaneous", which, as
jonpin has pointed out, we are not really supposed to do. Well, except for the one telling us to find the number of units in Z15, obviously.Bizarre slip-up: Intending to write Z3[x], I instead wrote Z3[3]. How that would work, I don't know.
See if you can find anything strange about the horribly evil problem 26, the 17-variable polynomial
jonpin mentioned:(t+2){1-[hi+s+w-a]2-[(sw+2r+i+1)(t+t)+e-n]2-[2b+y+t+h-e]2
-[16(j+1)3(u+2)(n+1)2+1-i2]2-[o3(r+2)(c+1)2+1-o2]2
-[(u2-1)n2+1-s2]2-[16e2l4(o2-1)+1-rs2]2
-[6(a+r)3(e+2)(n+1)2+1-t2]2
-[w3(e+2)(s+1)2+1-o2]2-[(v2-1)e2+1-r2]2-[y+6c2l4(e2-v)+e-1-r2]2}
-[16(j+1)3(u+2)(n+1)2+1-i2]2-[o3(r+2)(c+1)2+1-o2]2
-[(u2-1)n2+1-s2]2-[16e2l4(o2-1)+1-rs2]2
-[6(a+r)3(e+2)(n+1)2+1-t2]2
-[w3(e+2)(s+1)2+1-o2]2-[(v2-1)e2+1-r2]2-[y+6c2l4(e2-v)+e-1-r2]2}
Some people were wondering what the largest named/used number was today, and decided to look this up on Mathworld. It's Graham's Number, so far as we can tell, but more importantly, looking at the links from this, we found the Frivolous Theorem of Arithmetic. Wow.
For whatever reason, Labs 1 and 3 have been swapped. Our own lab, Error-Correcting Codes Group 1, has joined forces with Group 2 to create a group that is even more argumentative than before. Lab today essentially consisted of people writing down equations, throwing those equations out, writing new equations, giving examples, generalizing, scrapping the generalizations, waving pieces of paper at each other, drawing diagrams with lots of 1s and 0s on the board, arguing about efficiency, trying to evaluate weird limits, failing to evaluate weird limits, arguing that we needed to add more bits for a certain method, claiming that it was okay that we needed more bits somewhere since we saved enough bits by using this method that we could afford to put in a few extra, and using inconsistent variables and terminology to add to the confusion. And worse, I was in it.
I might have more to say now but I really have to go to the bathroom.
