Talk:Egyptian division: Difference between revisions
→Number Systems
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: So what's your point? Ancient Egyptians didn't use multiplication an exponentiation? I somehow doubt they used digital computers, Latin letters or Arabic numerals either; yet every example posted so far uses all of these. Horrors. The algorithm given in the task description ''specifically'' states to use multiplication and exponentiation to generate the table. In addition, the task isn't "Generate a table using methods an ancient Egyptian would and then use that table to do Egyptian division." If we're going to get into petty, pedantic nit-picking, I could point out that the F# example is incorrect because it doesn't display the specific example solution required by the task. --[[User:Thundergnat|Thundergnat]] ([[User talk:Thundergnat|talk]]) 15:15, 11 August 2017 (UTC)
:: The Perl and Python versions are absolutely consistent with the task description, and of course there's not much to be gained from antiquarianism or reconstructive archaeology here :-)
:: The kernel of Nigel's point does, however, seem interesting and fruitful to me – the heart, motivation, and logic of the algorithm is precisely to derive division from more primitive operators – and I think we might get a simpler (and perhaps more interesting ?) task description by foregrounding that, even tho it would cost us some tweaks to some of our first drafts. Asking people to show how one could formalise this algorithm, in a given language, '''purely in (arithmetic) terms of addition/subtraction''', seems like a more interesting task constraint, for example, than over-specifying the intermediate data structure. [[User:Hout|Hout]] ([[User talk:Hout|talk]]) 17:19, 11 August 2017 (UTC)
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