@XanderHenderson This balatant PSQ has already set a really bad example against EoQS and the bounty would greatly amplify such negative influence. Could mods do something under this circumstance?
Another PSQ with less severity, where the bounty start could have written a new post with sufficient context.
@BillDubuque Totally agree, but I already downvoted before so can't do it again. I can't understand why such circular reasoning can get 11 upvotes, but that happens a lot on Math SE.
@Saad amWhy said Xander might be busy these few days, so maybe ask @quid?
@user21820 But you can still star the critical comments (which, alas, were chatified, a very disturbing trend as of late, e.g. most readers would have no obvious clue the answer is bogus after all the critical comments were migrated offsite to chat)
The question says ''how to calculate ...'' but this person has just mentioned the answer, which clearly isn't helpful. So, it is not an answer. It should possibly be a comment.
@Saad I don't think there is any urgency to removing this bounty. It was placed month after the question was asked by a user that usually knows what they are doing. There is plenty of way worse stuff on the site.
@quid Unfortunate that limitation still exists. Oh well, I suppose if it gets DVed negative then that will be a good enough warning to readers. @Teresa It's accepted so we can't delete it the usual way.
Maybe it's worth leaving around so we can link to it the next time it occurs (if we can ever find it) I vaguely recall explaining this before but it's not likely easy to find (esp if the comments get chatified or deleted)
@TeresaLisbon I am even astonished that the question itself received so many upvotes. So, the usual method (deleting the question) will probably not work here.
Definitely, the described method to factor the number is not mathematics since it uses knowledge we just do not have.
@Peter Correct, I wish we could delete the approach. But on the other hand, I think playing on such magic is probably reflective of the fact that people aren't looking for the right things while voting on questions. We say : "let the community vote" but this is really awkward, because majority of community votes come, like fast food, from a "glimpse" of the answer.
We talk about technology today and how everything is programmed to come fast, whether it's information, whether it's food, whether it's transport or whatever. With those guidelines, answers on MSE are bound to be judged in a "fast" manner : in other words, nobody is looking at the meta part of this answer.
The fast part of it is : it's correct, the numbers come out of nowhere and so must be the author's creativity at show : vote UP.
The meta part of it, which you won't get if you slip into a fast judgement, is that the magical numbers come from the fact that the number was pre-factorized using a device, and so the entire computation holds no meaning as a productive tool that can be used for other computations.
In fact, here is the quite remarkable situation we fact when confronting such questions :
I just looked up the source of the book, Shakuntala Devi's "more puzzles to puzzle you" and the question was : "take a good look at this number : 222221. Is it prime?" The solutions manual literally had just : "222221 = 359*619" I mean, the book itself hasn't been written in an instructive manner.
@TeresaLisbon As we recently discussed. The non-ability to judge. And the presence of muchh too powerful computers make this effect even worse. Not only in mathematics : Grand masters in chess apparently cannot properly analyze a game anymore. Noone cares about their judgement because a chess program knows it better anyway. This is the high price we all have to pay for the electronic revolution. It obviously has serious drawbacks.
@Peter It does, you are so right. The answer in the thread we just discussed shows that.
I also realized, that if we coordinate, we can downvote and delete this question as well : although I like one of the answers. The truth is that the question hasn't improved.
It now has 2 delete votes so I guess we'll soon know if normal users can delete accepted answers. I can't recall a more extreme example on any site where a user steadfastly refuses to admit that they reverse engineered the solution - making it circular. It seems gamified platforms greatly exacerbate such problems (that answer has 11 upvotes).
@ArcticChar D12 is really strange. The asker claims to have "decades of experience with ecommerce" and "current interests are in serverless and machine learning", yet keeps insisting on that 50-50 nonsense in the comments...
@amWhy I'm a bit sad that we had to resort to such heavy handed moderation tools. But I suppose it is too idealistic to presume that logical argument will always win the day (idealism always gets the best of me)
@Axel PSQ == Problem Statement Question: a question that just states a problem, like a textbook or homework exercise, and nothing else. Often starts or finishes with "Prove..." or "I have no idea how to do thsi, please provide a detailed solution."
Just a general FYI: my daughter is in town for the summer. I am likely to be significantly less present than usual, particularly over weekends. I will try to follow up on pings, but I make no promises.
