Recent logs from the #scheme IRC channel.
Discussions and worked solutions to various puzzles, possibly quite incomplete.
I created score editions of Henry Purcell’s Ten Sonatas of Four Parts and Twelve Sonatas of Three Parts. These scores were transcribed from the original parts published in 1683 and 1697.
JRM’s syntax-rules Primer for the Merely Eccentric
The MIT Jargon File from circa 1988
Email: wcm at sigwinch dot xyzzy minus the zy.
You can usually find me (Zipheir) on IRC in the #scheme channel on libera.chat.
FTP.
A SIGWINCH gopherhole existed, but needs to be resurrected. I hope to get around to this sometime in 2022.
Now, many years ago, I got interested in the generalization of such a problem: I wanted to figure out formulae for the sums of squares, cubes, and higher powers, trying to find the sum of m things each up to the nth power. And I cracked it, finding a whole lot of nice relations. …
Anyway, I discovered later that these numbers had actually been discovered back in 1746. So I had made it up to 1746! They were called “Bernoulli Numbers”. … So I went through life like this, discovering next something that had first been discovered in 1889, then something from 1921 … and finally I discovered something that had the same date as when I discovered it. But I get so much fun out of doing it that I figure there must be others out there who do too, so I am giving you these problems to enjoy yourselves with. (Of course, everyone enjoys themselves in different ways.) I would just urge you not to be intimidated by them, nor put off by the fact that they’ve been done. You’re unlikely to discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff, but further, you should get a heck of a lot of fun out of working out funny relations and interesting things. Also, if you read what the other fool did, you can appreciate how hard it was to do (or not), what he was trying to do, what his problems were, and so forth. It’s much easier to understand things after you’ve fiddled with them before you read the solution.
—Richard P. Feynman, Feynman Lectures on Computation