

Street Fighting Mathematics: The art of educated guessing - xtacy
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/full_pdfs/Street-Fighting_Mathematics.pdf

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jimmyjim
Previous discussions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1548013> (many comments)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1106846> (2 comments)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2873902> (no comments)

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ColinWright
Erm, that last is this very item - so when you wrote that it had one comment,
and now has at least two.

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personalcompute
He doesn't appear to be a bot either. Hey, someone _should_ make a bot that
indicates previous discussions on reposts.

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epochwolf
It's been done: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2013666>

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xyzzyz
I glanced through "easy cases", and the "guessing the solution" part looks
more like "we somehow magically know that the solution is among these 3 or 5
possibilities, now we eliminate obviously wrong answers and lo, we found a
solution".

Seriously, just look at the treatment of Gaussian integral. They wonder if the
solution is sqrt(pi alpha) or sqrt(pi/alpha). Then they rule out the first
possibility. Yeah, that's fine, but why sqrt and pi at all? Why not sin and e?
Or gamma function and ... oh well this actually is a gamma function, but
nevermind.

Guessing is easy, if you already know the solution.

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wmat
For a duplicate post, it's sure been on the FrontPage for a long time.

