MC: Ping-Pong Cubes

[Valentin Albillo]

(05-26-2018 06:47 AM)pier4r Wrote:  

(05-25-2018 10:55 PM)ijabbott Wrote:  I don't know if there is a clever trick to this problem (I can't think of one, but I'm not that clever!) or if it's just a brute force search. If the latter, it's not very interesting to me,

The very fact that you don't know should tell you that it is interesting, as figuring out yourself which case applies is already a challenge.

Chill out, Pier.

As you can see, ijabbott is very new to this forum, just 69 posts right now, so he probably can't know for sure whether Joe has a reputation for posting brute-force search problems or not. Not having direct experience about Joe's challenges, he does the rational thing which is to directly ask for information to older members in this forum who surely should know, instead of entering a challenge which, for all he knows, might be uninteresting.

Quote:There is also an hint. Werner went throughthe numbers up to magnitude 10^34 in likely some hours or days , do you estimate it can be brute force?

Of course it can. If you meant that Werner explored all numbers from, say, 10 up to 10^34, he didn't say that. He said that he explored numbers up to 215 443 469 003, which is the cube root of 10^34, and that number is only 2e11, not 1e34, and requires on the order of 1e8 tests, which is entirely doable in at most a few hours by simple brute force.

Quote:Writing that we are not interested is first and foremost uninteresting (nobody asked us) and secondly it sounds a tad confrontational.

Consider what I said above, think about it, and then decide who's the one being confrontational. This is no helpful or friendly way to address a fairly new member.

Have a nice weekend.
V.
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