Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40

Project Euler problems typically involve finding or proving and then using a lemma that makes computation of the solution feasible without brute force. There is often an obvious brute force approach, but the pick problem sizes large enough such that it is just not fast enough, but the non-brute-force is.

As such, they live in the intersection of mathematics and computer science.

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7057408 which is mega high on Google says:

In many cases, the efficient solution involves dynamic programming.

There are also a set of problems which are very numerical analysis in nature and require the approximation of some real number to a given precision. These are often very fiddly as I doubt most people can prove that their chosen hyperparameters guarantee the required precision.

Many problems ask for solution modulo some number. In general, this is only so that C/C++ users won't have to resort to using an arbitrary-precision arithmetic library and be able to fit everything into uint64 instead. Maybe it also helps the judge system slightly having smaller strings to compare. The final modulos usually don't add any insight to the problems.

Bibliography:

Screenshot at: youtu.be/ekt6rYtOY94?t=213

Submission type: code.

License: problem setter dependant.

Saw this one mentioned on some Project Euler forum threads.

Nice motto, knowledge olympiads:

TODO none? Seriously?

Knowledge olympiads are events that trick young kids into thinking that they are making progress, but only serve to distract them from what really matters, which is to dominate a state of the art as fast as possible, contact researches in the area, and publish truly novel results.

They are financially backed by high schools trying to make ads showing how they will turn your kids into geniuses (but also passionate teachers who fell into this hellish system), or companies who hire machines rather than entrepreneurs.

It is a bit sad to work on a project that no one cares about. You're not sure if you're crazy or a visionary. And it is kind of lonely.

I sometimes wonder if I would be happy doing this for the rest of my life if I could. And if it would have any impact at all no matter for how long I do it. My feelings in that area go from slightly depressed to slightly excited about the potential a few times every week.

As we all know, living and making life choices means sacrificing other things that could have been. When I was in France in 2015, I started a masters course in AI/robotics with the idea of doing a PhD and AGI research later on but quit half way because I felt university was such a waste of time.

But come now the AI boom, and although I still believe Education is broken, I might have been much better off financially/reputationally if I had withstood the bullshit followed that path. Instead I sacrificed that for nerding about low level programming and open educational content.

It is hard to get such ideas off one's mind. But the fact is, for better or worse, I've started walking the path of educational reform and sacrificed others along the way, and this is the path that I'm further ahead than other people, and perhaps I should pursue it further to a possible conclusion. Also this path has the advantage that it is not fully exclusive from other academic endeavors as we will always need content about the new flashy things that keep coming up.

So yeah, it's hard, but here I am, and I'll go as far as I can without going into Charles Bukowski levels of personal sacrifice.

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