CompSoc doesn't have any regular coding events to my knowledge, yet a reasonable number of people in CompSoc participate in Project Euler, a large library of often rather difficult discrete maths problems. It is not clear to me whether the same is true of WMS members, but it is my belief that they /should/. :)

(This message has been sent to both the computing society at exec@uwcs.co.uk, which points to a mailing list which I subscribe to, and the mathematics society via their web form. I couldn't find an email address for them, so I'd like to suggest that WMS contact CompSoc with an email address as a first step.)

Normally these problems involve solving some sort of mathematical problem, and using the solution to write a simple computer program to search for solutions in a small search space. For example, http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=143 is clearly heavily mathematical and once the maths is done, I think the code is just a series of nested loops. Naively, however, the solution might involve O(120000^3) tests, one for each possible p>=q>=r - which will fail the "one minute rule" that solutions are to execute within a minute on a modest PC.

Sometimes the reverse is true, for instance Problem 96 asks the solver to produce a generic backtracking Sudoku solver.

Thus, the problems are obviously both of interest to those into maths, and those into coding. I wonder if CompSoc and WMS could between them host a social event in which these problems are studied? I feel it's against the spirit of the site to have the problems' solutions demonstrated where they are known, but perhaps some sort of 3 hour "lab" session at a pub would work?

What do you think?

Definitely sounds very interesting; I don't really think a lab session at a pub would be that good though, would probably end up being a bit pointless without any possibility of coding seeing the nature of most of the problems.

I don't really have much else to say or anything better to suggest; I know a few people here that are more serious about their coding than I am, they probably have better ideas.

I was thinking people could take their laptops. :)

do we have an email address?

You chaps have many, not least society@warwickmaths.org

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Regards
Steven Jones