[Haskell-cafe] haskellwiki and Project Euler

[Rodrigo Queiro]

What really puzzles me is that while Dan referred to the sporting spirit of
PE, this really doesn't seem to be a spirit embodied by many of the users.
Reading through the forum will reveal the first few posts to be of the form
"wrote a crappy brute force solver for the first few terms, searched OEIS,
'solved'". I really don't understand why someone would do that.

On 24/02/2008, Chaddaï Fouché <chaddai.fouche at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 2008/2/24, Rodrigo Queiro <overdrigzed at 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
>
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