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Don't fear the Maths
Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2009 11:34 am
by MagneticMonopole
Chapeau!
Creating this challenge must have been at least as hard as solving it!
Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2009 1:11 pm
by efe
The Comic is adapted from XKCD.
Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2009 4:52 pm
by Yharaskrik
I totally agree with MagneticMonopole...
I think it's one of the top ten coolest challenges
Posted: Mon May 11, 2009 8:43 pm
by gfoot
Yeah. I hated it until I realised I'd simplified the equation wrongly!
Posted: Mon May 11, 2009 11:52 pm
by tails
Ditto - I misread "
i" to "2"
Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2009 7:14 pm
by therethinker
That was *amazing*. One of my favorites, hands down.
Nice ending, too <3
I had the hardest time with just graphing it! I simplified out the "hard" parts, but I couldn't solve for y. (I don't think the answer would have shown thru even if I did). In the end, I gave up and graphed it in 3D setting a max of 2, which ended up working.
Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2012 12:47 pm
by nighthalk
heh i was stumped for a while until i remembered the original mentioned euler as a hint. fixed up the equation, and started plotting a black/white image for whose that satisfy it.
the eps ^ (huge thing) is also hard to see from images generated by the equation... had to parse it manually to make sure it was a power and not just a esp*phi.
Posted: Wed Aug 28, 2013 12:53 pm
by dangermouse
i also finished in the last pitfall, thought the solution was something like delta or euler's triangle!
one of the best challenges of the site! congratulations to Chocoholic for creating it!
Posted: Sun Mar 27, 2016 12:15 pm
by Hippo
After getting the TeX source, I have put $$ around it and compiled.
The equation had just 2 points as a solution.
After a very long time (3 months) I have looked at the source code more closely to discover it used LaTeX \frac so I had to add \def\frac#1#2{{#1\over#2}}.
Afterwards it was simple ... I have expected heartsuite is the only possible output, but I have reduced it to
$$
y=|x|+d, d^2+e^{2|x|+d-3}<3, |d|<\sqrt{3}, |x|<{3+\sqrt{3}+\ln 3\over 2}, |y|<{3+3\sqrt{3}+\ln 3\over 2}
$$
And I have switched to java to plot the solution rather to continue analytically.
Posted: Sat May 06, 2017 9:35 am
by Adenium
This is really a cool problem. I stuck for a whole day before I realized I was trying to solve the inequality as
while it is actually
[/code]
After that, the solution is just straightforward using WolframAlpha.