Re: [PLUG] Topics for PLUG in January

[Walt Mankowski via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Thu, Jan 06, 2022 at 07:23:11PM -0500, Lynn Bradshaw via plug wrote:
> The scare quotes are there because it was a tongue-in-cheek remark.
> True cheating would be stealing others' code or looking up the answers
> and just plugging them in. (They're all some easily verified
> non-negative integer as opposed to the approach many other sites use
> with an automated code judge.)
> 
> Having said that, for some it might subvert what they deem the true
> purpose of Project Euler, which would be to develop a full grasp of
> the mathematical principles underlying the puzzles and implement all
> one's own algorithms to get the answer.

I don't know how far you've gotten through Project Euler. I've done
the first 100 problems, plus 16 more in the next set of 50. The first
set of 50 can generally be solved with a brute force approach. After
that they increasingly require some mathematical insight that
something like a graph library isn't necessarily going to help you
with.

I'm not saying to NOT roll your own. In fact, problem sets like these
are a great thing to practice on. I'm just saying that it's also a
good way to learn what sorts of tools are available so that you DON'T
have to write your own.

> For a little bit, I was using
> SageMath to do them. Here's a description of SageMath from the
> website:
> 
> "SageMath is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed
> under the GPL. It builds on top of many existing open-source packages:
> NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Maxima, GAP, FLINT, R and many more.
> Access their combined power through a common, Python-based language or
> directly via interfaces or wrappers.
> Mission: Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma,
> Maple, Mathematica and Matlab."
> 
> (Yes, it's very close to Python except with embellishments like ^ for
> exponentiation and underscores in numbers to make them easier to read,
> which Python badly needs. In fact you can see how it transpiles to
> Python.)

I'm confused by this statement. Python already lets you put
underscores in numbers. It also has an exponentiation operator, but it
uses ** since ^ is already used for bitwise-or (presumably copied from
C).

Walt

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