Talk:Hofstadter-Conway $10,000 sequence

Work in progress

I still have a pretty picture and some links to add tonight, but I intend the task aims to stay the same. --Paddy3118 09:22, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Yep, The New York Times seems to have got the exact details of the competition wrong. I was wondering why my maxima were under 0.55 so quickly when the NYT mentions n>2**31. See here, which agrees with this. Does the draft status of the task allow me to change its goals with impunity ;-)

--Paddy3118 05:48, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Mallows' Number

According to Mathworld, the correct number is 1489, yet some of the entries are giving different results. Shouldn't they be marked as incorrect?

Well, the only ones that are correct according to the task description are the ones giving 1490, but that's because the task description is incorrect. The task description has n >= p whereas the Mathworld page you mention says i > n, not i >= n. So I think we'll need to fix both the task and the programs that were written to that spec. Oddly, at least one of the programs that gets 1489 (C#) appears to get the right answer for the wrong reason; it's returning a result using 0-based indexing, which compensates for adding one to match the bogus task description. The Ada and Algol algorithms are truly incorrect, insofar as they are computing the last *maximum* that was larger than .55, not the last ratio. a(1487) is larger than a(1489), but a(1489) is still above .55, so wins as the last one. --TimToady 21:37, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

I've gone and fixed all the ones that were just off-by-one from the bogus task description. The C# one doesn't really need fixing, if the +1 is taken as compensating for 0-based arrays rather than calculating a different p. The Ada and Algol entries are now correctly marked incorrect. :) --TimToady 22:26, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the cleanup. I can only think that I copied a duff equation in one of my sources; which is odd, as I used more than one source when researching the task? (I could have just inserted an error but I prefer to blame some nebulous 'other'). --Paddy3118 16:09, 9 December 2010 (UTC)