gnpatterson

if they have with drawn it it may be because they consider it to be too flawed to continue using it, I am going to take a break from the problem. I am sure you have found that it helps to come back to a problem after a period of rest and some fresh ideas. On this occasion I have learnt that I need to be able to add more flexibility into an approach and I will try to do this from the beginning next time.

I think the puzzle was reset to make it a new puzzle for people that had got the old one. Perhaps the old "answer" got out into the public domain and the authors had to do this. If you read the site they discourage solving the problem on forums as it invalidates the test, something I have a great deal of sympathy with

Thanks for the suggestions, I will stick them in the "model" manually and see if any thing useful starts to come out. It sounds so high fallooting to call it a model it is really a just a very messy spread sheet with a lot of obscure functions. All I do is calculate the square difference of each name/number from the given target value and try to minimise this value with solver. I cant help feeling that I am just ploughing futher and further away from the simple "trick" answer. I introduce noise to the problem by randomly weighting the names I need to adapt it to use a gaussian for the difference calculation to try and free up some of the "bad" equations more. My thinking is that if an equation is off a little bit then the value will need to stray quiet far, however this does mean I will start to get lots of local minima and I will need to explore them is some systemic way. There must be a better tool for this than doing it on a spread sheet, but I will have to learn it. Ho Hum.

The plan is to start looking for pair correlations in the sequences I get from the stoicastic generation of solutions. The spelling inconsistency is not specifically "blurred" by the method I used but the weight of each equation is. I could add some "blurr" for the different spellings but I am going to have to do a lot of re-writting for that ro..ntgen or roentgen plank or planck block or bloch cerenkov or cerenkov lippman or lippmann schrodinger or schro..dinger michelson michaelson what else is possible? Can you spell einstein differently?

Now I'm looking for a unique set of the numbers 1 to 26 based on the 26 physicists given. For example the day of the DOB of each one or something like that. The set up of the puzzle has to be based on some reason. perhaps the clue is in the phyicists them selves. I know that they are listed in the order that they got their nobles so I don't thing this is going to be used as a key. In some way they might give the key values in some standard fact about them.

You can think about attacking the problem from the other end and look for a pangram that encodes the information. If you think about it you must at some point have to fill in for jxyq or at the very least you have to fill in for y so the solution must in some way make the choice of y obvious. You cant simply have four blanks in the mapping that you have to guess. The way I might do it is to use a pangram or a close to pangramatic sentence for example The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog - this is the classic next you remove the duplicates either from the back or the front, here I'll take them from the back t h e q u i c k b r o w n f x j m p s v r l z y d g 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011121314151617181920212223242526 now you have a cypher that if you know most of it you can fill in the gaps with some intelligence now of course you can make it harder, write it backwards, interleave the sequence or something like that but at the core you have to have a recognisable pangram (or holoalphabetic sentence). Using a stocastic process I get a range of sequences HWKNCOFSREMZUGPALDTIBV or HKNFCMDEROSZWUPGTBALVI or WHKNOSCFREMZUGPALITDBV the last one looks a bit like "Why know ..." but I don't know the rest, this is probably a red herring anyway

I am very frustrated with this problem. The problem has to be one that responds to "intelligence" (what ever that might be) but the information given is over-constrained and possibly has errors in it. I used a systematic method of producing a function from the square of the differences of the values I calculate (guess) and those given; I ask the computer to minimise this value; If I use lippman the closest I can get is a value of about 6 If I use lippmann I get closer ie 2.15 from this I conclude the given spelling of lippman is not the one used to calculate the value given OR as usual I am being too clever and havent got the right methodology I feel that previous questions have submitted not my intelligence but to my education and to solve the problems like the furbles I have to get educated in the appropriate areas. Since this problem claims to be a sort of replacement cypher with linear algebra I should have the right tools already, they just don't seem to work, what am I doing wrong?

K is potassium (Kalium) I remember my great aunt used to drink Kali Water, it tasted awful, just salty really. You will be more familiar with Soda Water. I am just looking for a why to assign values to letters, I could for example chose the first element with that letter in its symbol, then take the value of some property, add them up and round to the nearest integer.

I did a "best fit" and found that I could get very close to all the numbers if I pushed in the following H 1.941387218 K 4.366854884 N 5.817678593 C 5.877435799 O 7.340505544 M 7.603136588 W 8.709634012 S 8.966204991 E 9.058950648 F 10.13546858 R 10.59238625 Z 13.27188824 U 16.8611718 P 17.38422521 D 18.16935517 G 19.33591223 A 20.44785112 T 21.50164429 B 23.57054932 L 23.64017927 I 24.61005161 V 26.81398993 Putting these in order I note that H, K, N, C and O are elements close to the top of the periodic table. I note that N and C have very close values. Is Chemistry a clue?

I note that they are listed in the order they got their noble prizes

If you calculate the average value per letter it works out at about 12.5 which would indicate that the puzzle is playing reasonably fairly. You might consider the spelling and character set used but letters 1-26 would average at 13.5 while 0-25 at 12.5. maybe it is 0 -26 or 1 - 27 with and o with two dots, maybe not.

There would not appear to be any effective strategy for not getting got, so I feel no shame.

Your request for the "Mass vs Distance for forces due to gravitation" is rather like the question "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" you are suppoused to learn the lesson of the question more than learn the answer. The lesson of the question in both cases has at lot to do with futility.

As far as the position of the planets might be concerned I had assumed that the Ptolemaic model was accurate in the angular position but failed to give the radial position at all accurately. So would fail to give predict the relative brightness of the planets. I would also assume that the system did not neccessarily recognise the source of the planets light as being reflected from the sun. I know that I was shocked to find out that the system of epicycles that ptolemy used did not correspond to that of our approximate orbit around the sun added to all the planet's approximate orbits. Perhaps this question is to make sure that you are clear on this concept.

There would also be gravitational reshifts, ie the light from stars in the middle of a galaxy would have to have to climb out of the gravity well of the galaxy, light from a galaxy in a cluster of glaxays would have to climb out of the cluster's gravity, light from a super cluster etc. This red shift is observed and is predicted from GR.

geostationary orbit 35,786 km above mean sea level at equator

e=1 is a special case, if you plot some other values you will see other conic sections. The form of the equation _is_ that of an ellipse, if you have to, you can rearrange it into the cannonical form. Do you remember the trick of completing the square?

I disagree that people before Galileo did not have a correct intuition about how masses fell. For example if you challenged an ancient to a game of darts with differently massed darts, I don't think they would do significantly worse than someone today. The historical period that Galileo lived in had a dogmatic view about the motion of objects that was specifically Aristotolean, in that view an object fell faster as it neared the ground because the purpose of its fall (to reach the ground) was getting nearer. It was in fact education that Galileo had to overcome not intuition.

intuition can be useful in getting the correct answer if it is good. then you dont need the maths to back it up, it is much quicker and opperates without pen and paper (or calculator), it is better to educate your intuition as well as learn the formulea, writing off intuition is bad move

I disagree that it is counter-intuitive, Galileo Galilei gave a good intuitive arguement for the idea that two masses should travel in the same path neglecting air resistence. He put forward the thought experiment of having two equal masses separated by a infintesimal thread that you can add or remove, since the presence/absence of the thread is irrelevant then the amount of mass is intuitively irrelevant.

I expect you to be hung, drawn and quartered if you dare to mention a fictious force that cancels gravity. The concept is rightly being expunged from the physics texts of all civilisation. The concept of "freefall" and "apparent weightless" are much more useful. The current dogma is that space craft in _any_ orbit be it circular, elliptical or hyperbolic are moving in freefall therefore the occupants experience no weight relative to the craft. You should only be expected by your teacher to realise that the gravitational field at 900 km up is in the first approximation the same as that on the surface. If you need to calculate it I strongly suggest that you use the radius of the earth as 6400 km and the radius for your craft as 7300 km = 6400 + 900. You should first show that you can calculate g using the text book values for G,R,M the gravitational constant, earth radius and earth mass. M=5.9736×10^24 kg G=6.674×10^-11 Nm2kg-2 R=6.356×10^6 m using g(surface)=GM/(r*r) = appox 10 N/kg at orbital height g(orbit) = approx 7.6 N/kg the explanation you must give/understand is that weightlessness would be experienced by any spacecraft in free fall at that point (and any other point) in space because the craft is in free fall. If the craft is in freefall orbit, if the craft has been shot out of a large cannon and is at the top of its arc, if the craft was suspended by a piece of string from the moon that was cut just a second ago and is now falling toward earth, if the craft was shot from jupiter and is headed straight for the sun, it is all irrelevant to the experience of weightless. (of course the people inside might care about which of the different scenarios is involved, the phyics does not)

Sorry I looked at the problem and I cant prove it, the method i suggested is rubbish. please post if you do get the proof

proof would, I assume, be by iteration, and that is where your knowledge of difference equations would come in. if you make f(x) and g(x) be of degree n then make the proof work if for some f' and g' of degree n-1 ( f' related to f in some way and g' related to g in some way) if h' exists hope this helps

In chemical terms the easiest difference to detect is the presence or absence of dissolved air. You can see the air coming coming out of the water when you freeze it, boiled and cooled water gives clear icecubes while unboiled water gives cloudy icecubes. In philosophical terms the question is to difficult for me. Does a tree-fall make a sound if no-one hears it? I think probably yes but i cant say why

To address the original question. If you have an perfectly logical method you should not need to guess at all, even with the most difficult puzzle. I have done a many of the "evil" class of puzzle but have not had to "guess" though I use some pencil marks to add information to the puzzle.