Nicely done, Channel 9 (posted by Dr Herbie).

Geoffreyk said:

Charles said:

*snip*

Thanks Charles

 

This was a fun one. I like to make sure that the 'truth' is always somewhere in the source

My blood started to boil and I was writing a draft email full of abuse in my head!

"Ive been coming to the coffeehouse for six years and......!!!!"

Got me!!!

LarryLarsen said:

Charles said:

*snip*

Kudos to everyone who figured it out, figure out a way to find out, and even brute forced through the js.

,,i couldnt get in! ... i tried a few things... then i went - wait... it cant be hard...  ahhh    * 9! *

Am I the only one who got:

f^7 f(x) (fλ).(xλ).f

?

SlackmasterK said:

Am I the only one who got:

 

f^7 f(x) (fλ).(xλ).f

 

?

I'm all for april fools, but this makes it so you can't enter the forums or use the site. Don't see the point of it.

My first attempt was entering "What is threeive?"  (from an old saturday night live sketch), but that just got me the "Come on, really?" response....

I had to use the equation editor in word to figure out what the sign meant.  Once I found out it stands for product, it was just a matter of putting it in excel.  Thanks for the entertainment and challenge.

First I...

And then I...

But then...

And suddenly...

And then I ended up here... Now what!?

All in all, my algebra teacher would probably scalp me and go with "Y cannot be 9, Y can only be formulated as Y->9"...

bureX said:

First I...

 

And then I...

 

But then...

 

 

And suddenly...

 

 

And then I ended up here... Now what!?

All in all, my algebra teacher would probably scalp me and go with "Y cannot be 9, Y can only be formulated as Y->9"...

Wow. Did you also program your FPGA to try to compute it for you?

Bass said:

bureX said:

*snip*

Wow. Did you also program your FPGA to try to compute it for you?

We'll make a steampunk version eventually 

bureX said:

Bass said:

*snip*

We'll make a steampunk version eventually 

I tried computing the value of the product using the highest value of k possible to see how fast it converges, using a 56 node cluster (I know there are better ways to compute something like this; doing it in a hopelessly convoluted way was kind of the point here). The problem is, doubles aren't precise enough, and Math.Pow doesn't support decimals. Does anyone know a good, fast, high precision floating point library for .Net?

EDIT: Worked around the lack of Math.Pow by simply multiplying the value three times. Definitely more precise than double, but also a lot slower. Even on these 56 nodes it takes me about 3.5 minutes to calculate for k = 1 through 10,000,000,000. The same scenario with double takes only 21 seconds, but yields a clearly different result.

Mind you, doing the same thing on my local machine would've taken roughly 7 hours.

Sven Groot said:

bureX said:

*snip*

I tried computing the value of the product using the highest value of k possible to see how fast it converges, using a 56 node cluster (I know there are better ways to compute something like this; doing it in a hopelessly convoluted way was kind of the point here). The problem is, doubles aren't precise enough, and Math.Pow doesn't support decimals. Does anyone know a good, fast, high precision floating point library for .Net?

 

EDIT: Worked around the lack of Math.Pow by simply multiplying the value three times. Definitely more precise than double, but also a lot slower. Even on these 56 nodes it takes me about 3.5 minutes to calculate for k = 1 through 10,000,000,000. The same scenario with double takes only 21 seconds, but yields a clearly different result.

 

Mind you, doing the same thing on my local machine would've taken roughly 7 hours.

Some results with various maximum values of k:

Max. value of k     Formula value                    Execution time
100,000,000         5.9999998200000059999997770956   15s
10,000,000,000      5.9999999982000000009369275168   208s
50,000,000,000      5.9999999996400000005856836804   1069s

This is done using decimal. If that's precise enough, and my code has no bugs, we can conclude the product converges quite slowly. Again, this was done on a cluster with 56 nodes (most of which aren't very fast, though). Done locally, it wouldn't taken me about 33 hours. Note that the 100,000,000 job (the first one) takes unnecessarily long because the system I'm using isn't optimized for short jobs.

There, I think I can now safely claim the most elaborate solution to this problem.

Sven Groot said:

Sven Groot said:

*snip*

Some results with various maximum values of k:

 

Max. value of k     Formula value                    Execution time
100,000,000         5.9999998200000059999997770956   15s
10,000,000,000      5.9999999982000000009369275168   208s
50,000,000,000      5.9999999996400000005856836804   1069s

 

This is done using decimal. If that's precise enough, and my code has no bugs, we can conclude the product converges quite slowly. Again, this was done on a cluster with 56 nodes (most of which aren't very fast, though). Done locally, it wouldn't taken me about 33 hours. Note that the 100,000,000 job (the first one) takes unnecessarily long because the system I'm using isn't optimized for short jobs.

 

There, I think I can now safely claim the most elaborate solution to this problem.

Awesome, in our office we did joke about creating a 1000 node azure cluster to do it but it was luch time and there was curry calling

Sven Groot said:

Sven Groot said:

*snip*

Some results with various maximum values of k:

 

Max. value of k     Formula value                    Execution time
100,000,000         5.9999998200000059999997770956   15s
10,000,000,000      5.9999999982000000009369275168   208s
50,000,000,000      5.9999999996400000005856836804   1069s

 

This is done using decimal. If that's precise enough, and my code has no bugs, we can conclude the product converges quite slowly. Again, this was done on a cluster with 56 nodes (most of which aren't very fast, though). Done locally, it wouldn't taken me about 33 hours. Note that the 100,000,000 job (the first one) takes unnecessarily long because the system I'm using isn't optimized for short jobs.

 

There, I think I can now safely claim the most elaborate solution to this problem.

There, I think I can now safely claim the most elaborate solution to this problem. 

If I may interject, I suggest we purchase the following gadget (maybe it's listed on ebay, eh?):

...and calculate the product convergence all the way to k=6.1871539834134776012651492465284 x 10^34 (the reciprocal value of Planck's length). Maybe we can halt the Folding@Home or the Seti@Home projects for a temporary period while we use the available CPU time for the calculation of the said problem. After all, this IS channel9, not channel 8.9999999999873293. I, for one, will not stand for this mathematical discrepancy. If anybody has watched the movie Pi, there is a magic number out there that can make all computers become self-aware, predict the functioning of the stock market and reveal god to the Jewish people (maybe it can even aid in the making of lumpless pudding*). If we all work together, maybe we can find this neatly secluded needle in the haystack... or maybe not... after all, I've got some lumpy pudding to tend to (it has just cooled down enough to please my picky taste buds)... Happy april fools day everybody