tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Problems from Malaysia)

theojf comments on "Problems from Malaysia" (6742)

theojf — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:31:25 -0700

Incidentally, you can also "vote to CW" by going in and editing the post, if you have enough rep to do so. After some finite number (8?) of edits by other people, posts automatically convert. Not that I think this is a good thing to do, but it is technically feasible.

Wadim Zudilin comments on "Problems from Malaysia" (6539)

Wadim Zudilin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 17:46:19 -0700

Thanks for all these comments! I am really convinced now about the strategy.

Kevin Buzzard comments on "Problems from Malaysia" (6536)

Kevin Buzzard — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:51:05 -0700

It has been said before, and I think it's true, that "question X must be OK because it led to question Y, which is generally accepted as being OK" is not a valid argument. I have to be careful what I say here because I wrote question Y (I'm referring to the original post by wadim above) but basically the counter-argument was that the community here is sufficiently robust that it might generate its own OK questions from pretty much any source.

As for the original questions in the post in question, they're clearly Olympiad-style and hence probably not right for this forum (despite the fact that some Olympiad-style stuff does get through). For example the first one involves, if you're a bright teenager, being able to spot that sqrt(50)+7 has sqrt(2)+1 as a cube root. This absolutely smacks of Olympiad and there are other places to talk about such things.

Qiaochu Yuan comments on "Problems from Malaysia" (6533)

Qiaochu Yuan — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:59:51 -0700

"6th form" likely refers to a Malaysian math competition which is divided up based on grade, rather than problems which are routinely assigned in school. (It doesn't invalidate your point, but "school-level" is a slightly inaccurate label.)

Robin Chapman comments on "Problems from Malaysia" (6532)

Robin Chapman — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:32:42 -0700

The questions were labelled as "6th form maths problems".
In the UK, and I presume in Malaysia too, the sixth form
is the last two years of secondary school. By the author's
own admission these are school-level, not research questions.
Closure was quite sufficiently justified.

Qiaochu Yuan comments on "Problems from Malaysia" (6527)

Qiaochu Yuan — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:42:10 -0700

Question #29926 is different. Without knowing where it's from, there's no way to tell if it's Olympiad-level or considerably harder (e.g. on the level of Catalan's conjecture). Knowing that it could be solved by congruences, I would have voted to close it and suggested that the OP ask at artofproblemsolving.com, but I didn't have that information when I saw that question before it was answered.

On the other hand, the Malaysian questions both 1) look much more like Olympiad questions and 2) were clearly identified as such. We should use any information we have in determining whether a question is appropriate.

Question #29978 isn't great, either, but at least it could potentially have been an easy step that someone in their research was stuck on, whereas there was no possibility of that with the Malaysian questions.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Problems from Malaysia" (6525)

Anton Geraschenko — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:17:35 -0700

You can effectively vote to make a post CW by leaving a comment clearly explaining why it should be CW and flagging the post for moderator attention. If there's a consensus and the reasoning is good, then a moderator can convert it to wiki. If there isn't a consensus, it may be worth starting a thread on meta. Implementing vote-to-wiki (0) is not possible for us, (1) is likely to lead to "CW-bullying", and (2) makes the system more complicated without a very good reason.

Wadim Zudilin comments on "Problems from Malaysia" (6523)

Wadim Zudilin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 07:39:26 -0700

Great answer!

I leave the remaining Q: why we can vote for closing a question but cannot vote for turning it into a CW mode?

Mariano comments on "Problems from Malaysia" (6521)

Mariano — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 07:19:15 -0700

No criterion is resistant to sufficiently good attempts at breaking it.

(I write that having just yesterday endured the joys of the security measures at several international airports...)

Wadim Zudilin comments on "Problems from Malaysia" (6520)

Wadim Zudilin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 06:51:17 -0700

But if the author is smarter and hides the origin of his problems, we don't count them as HW, right?

Ben Webster comments on "Problems from Malaysia" (6519)

Ben Webster — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 06:30:23 -0700

Wadim-

I'm not sure I understand. The title certainly seems to suggest that they are homework problems, and MO has a very explicit "no HW" policy. Even if they are difficult and interesting HW problems.

Wadim Zudilin comments on "Problems from Malaysia" (6517)

Wadim Zudilin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 05:14:03 -0700

I believe that the collective (including myself) decision about
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/30019/
is wrong. What could we do if the author puts his 3 problems on MO
separately, say 1 problem per day? Would we realise that these
are olympic problems and this contradicts the philosophy of MO?
(By the way, I could not find this contradicting the FAQ.)
Two recent examples of "similar" problems:
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/29978/
and
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/29926/
(in the last case the discussions resulted in a far-from-elementary
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/30031/).

In the case of the Malaysian question I would suggest to reopen it
in the status of CW question, so that the MO residents could "discuss"
the 3 independent problems "in live".

A related point: why we can vote for closing a question but cannot
vote for turning it into a CW mode?