Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="tarchon" data-source="post: 1404951" data-attributes="member: 5990">Dude, how is saying that a huge long combinatorics formula is long and useless being a jerk?&nbsp; Are you a huge long combinatorics formula?&nbsp; If not, then in what way do you take that as an insult?&nbsp; I guess the idea is that if someone says I'm wrong, it's OK, and if someone says you're wrong it's &quot;being a jerk&quot;?&nbsp; If you don't want input, don't post a thread asking for it.Here's why huge long combinatorics formulas are simply long and useless.&nbsp; All a combo formula is is shorthand for an arithmetic procedure.&nbsp; If the formula is really simple like COMB(n,m)*n or something, it makes some sense to use it instead of just using the computer to count events because, while you probably still can't easily work it without a calculator, you can easily find a calculator or simple program like Excel that can do it, because the operations are fairly standard and easy to combine.OTOH, with something even remotely like <img src="http://www.xenomind.com/enworld/finform.gif" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />,you've got multiple levels (in one case 3) of iterated sums of COMB and !.&nbsp; It probably takes as long to calculate that formula as it would to run through every single one of the 6^4 events and test them individually.&nbsp; Given that the deepest operations are COMB and !, it may take even longer since neither of them is particularly efficient to calculate or well behaved.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="tarchon, post: 1404951, member: 5990"] Dude, how is saying that a huge long combinatorics formula is long and useless being a jerk? Are you a huge long combinatorics formula? If not, then in what way do you take that as an insult? I guess the idea is that if someone says I'm wrong, it's OK, and if someone says you're wrong it's "being a jerk"? If you don't want input, don't post a thread asking for it. Here's why huge long combinatorics formulas are simply long and useless. All a combo formula is is shorthand for an arithmetic procedure. If the formula is really simple like COMB(n,m)*n or something, it makes some sense to use it instead of just using the computer to count events because, while you probably still can't easily work it without a calculator, you can easily find a calculator or simple program like Excel that can do it, because the operations are fairly standard and easy to combine. OTOH, with something even remotely like [IMG]http://www.xenomind.com/enworld/finform.gif[/IMG], you've got multiple levels (in one case 3) of iterated sums of COMB and !. It probably takes as long to calculate that formula as it would to run through every single one of the 6^4 events and test them individually. Given that the deepest operations are COMB and !, it may take even longer since neither of them is particularly efficient to calculate or well behaved. [/QUOTE]

Verification