Comment by epcoa
12 hours ago
Were any of the 39 answers to a question that was not likely to be from a sock puppet?
Doesn’t necessarily make the solutions less impressive, but it’s kind of a relevant detail that is left out in the Wikipedia summary.
Well, it does make the solutions less impressive, right? Because it's much easier to compute the inverse of an integral than an integral. What's impressive here is more in composing problems that have nice answers and can't be solved by computer algebra systems, then the sock puppet trick to conceal that you ha the answer all along.
Reshetnikov didn't confess to them being reverse engineered, though. He confessed to them being conjecture arrived at after working on the problem for a bit by tweaking similar integrals in symbolic math software / numerical approximations. Every post was a gamble because it could have been wrong.
Of course, that could be a lie, but he came clean about other things that make sense retrospectively.
> Every post was a gamble because it could have been wrong
Symbolic differentiation is a deterministic algorithm. There is no reason for his posts to be a gamble. I'm sure there was a lots of interesting trial and error in developing good question and answer pairs, but once he posted the question he knew what the answer was already.
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