Editing FizzBuzzForMathematicians
You are currently not logged in.
To change this, fill in the following fields:
Username
Password
Who can read this page?
The World
Members
Council
Admin
You have been granted an edit lock on this page
until Thu Apr 25 08:27:12 2024.
Press
to finish editing.
Who can edit this page?
World editing disabled
Members
Council
Admin
It's well-known (for some definition of "well-known") and deeply controversial that 80% (some say 90%) of applicants for programmer jobs can't actually program[0][1]. Recruiting good programmers (for some definition of "good") is a known "Hard Problem(tm)" To this end an initial "bozo-filter" is sometimes applied, wherein a candidate is asked to write some utterly trivial code to demonstrate that they have at least a basic grasp of how to write programs. A common test is the "FizzBuzz" test - go look it up. So I was idly speculating - what would be a similar initial filter for "Mathematician"? This is clearly an impossible question, because we don't actually know what a mathematician is, nor do we ~really know what a mathematician does. However, we don't actually know what programmers do either, so maybe that's OK. One possibility that came to mind is this question: * An "equivalence relation" on a set *X* is a function _ _ EQN:E:X{\times}X\rightarrow\{T,F} _ that satisfies these three conditions: ** For all */x/* in */X,/* */E(x,x)=T,/* ** For all */x/* and */y/* in */X,/* */E(x,y)=E(y,x),/* ** If */E(x,y)=T/* and */E(y,z)=T,/* then */E(x,z)=T./* * Suppose */E(x,y)=F/* and */E(y,z)=T./* What can you say about */E(x,z)/* ? * Prove it. Problem is, I wonder if too many non-mathematicians can pass this test to make it of any value. Can you? ---- References: * [0] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmers-program.html * [1] http://www.globalnerdy.com/2012/11/15/fizzbuzz-still-works/