Poll & solutions

[elz]

First:

Poll #1689

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 25

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Tickyboxes!

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Finished lecture 2
24 (96.0%)

Finished problem set 1
15 (60.0%)

Also, it occurs to me that it might be handy to have a place to post/discuss solutions to the problem sets, to see what we can learn from each other in the absence of TAs. If you actually go to MIT and the problem sets are still the same, don't read these. ;)

Fire away!

Comments

[gchick]

nods whereas I looked at the divisibility-by-primes issue and decided to sacrifice the efficiency of *only* testing on primes in favor of the efficiency of not having to repeatedly call on the list comprehension functions (with the assumption that most composite numbers would be divisible by something *kinda* low and so wouldn't have to go through a ton of test iterations anyway). I'm now really curious to test further...

Of course, that's for choosing the 1000th prime; if I were trying to find the umpty-billionth, I'd probably try to find a way that wasn't brute-forcing it at all, but I'd also be making a lot more money in something crypto-related!

[elz]

Yeah, the trade-offs in speed and overhead of different approaches - that's one of the things I really, really want to understand better.

Of course, that's for choosing the 1000th prime; if I were trying to find the umpty-billionth, I'd probably try to find a way that wasn't brute-forcing it at all, but I'd also be making a lot more money in something crypto-related!

Heh, yes indeed.