Re: integers and arrays inJava - how?

"Roedy Green" <my_email_is_posted_on_my_website@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:i4eo22l6hu74uprgpabtipem2mghh1vji2@xxxxxxxxxx
On Thu, 30 Mar 2006 12:54:07 -0500, "Rhino"
<no.offline.contact.please@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote, quoted or indirectly
quoted someone who said :


Asking you to do the impossible is a valid thing to do as a learning point
and I've heard of it happening before. It still doesn't seem likely that it
was involved in the question that the original poster asked.

Our math teacher did that to us. I spend the Easter holidays chewing
on the solution and I solved it , with about 10 pages of densely
packed algebra. The problem was not impossible, just a university
level problem usually solved with trigonometry which we had not
studied.

I had another professor who asked us something which was, strictly speaking, not impossible, but in some ways this was "crueler": The professor basically said, if we wanted to have an interesting problem to tackle over the weekend, that we should try to solve the P = NP problem. He didn't actually call it that, of course; rather gave a few (NP-complete) problems and asked for a polynomial time solution for them. He said not to worry if we couldn't solve them, as we wouldn't be penalized, but we could expect "bonus points" if we did solve them, and that "most students" he has asked in previous years did not manage to solve it.

It wouldn't be until a few semesters later, in a different course taught by a different professor, that we would learn that this problem is (famously) unsolved.

- Oliver

.