Evidently. I had a look at the PE site and couldn't find anything about the intentions of the people running it regarding a sphere containing the problems. If one of their problems leads someone to something of research interest, I have no problem with seeing it on MO.

However, the PE people do insist that people mentioning their problems elsewhere give an attribution, and I'm ready to close as spam any problem posted on MO that doesn't do that.

Well, I registered on Project Euler. I see no way to contact the founders, but there is this note at the bottom of the questions list page:

Quotation from a Project Euler page:

"NOTE: Please do not contact Project Euler if you are unable to solve a particular problem. If you can't solve it, then you can't solve it! "

I also found a nice article, link from Wikipedia, anyway http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/06/how-i-failed-failed-and-finally-succeeded-at-learning-how-to-code/239855/

The Atlantic article gives a fairly compelling picture of intent, that students are expected to work through the whole set of P.E. problems themselves, rather than farm out the tricky parts to experts.


Also this:

http://projecteuler.net/copyright

Hi, Quid.

I was able to send a request for clarification to James Somers, the author of the Atlantic Magazine article about P.E. I don't think P.E. envisioned participants asking a website full of mathematics professors for shortcuts to their questions. Indeed, PE seems to have begun in 2001, MO in 2009.
Maybe he will forward something to Colin Hughes of PE, maybe not.

From you and Gerry, the issue for MO users is the interest level of the question, as long as attribution is proper.

Quoted from http://projecteuler.net/about

I solved it by using a search engine, does that matter?

Making use of the internet to research a problem is to be encouraged as there could be hidden treasures of mathematics to be discovered beneath the surface of many of these problems. However, there is a fine line between researching ideas and using the answer you found on another website. If you photocopy a crossword solution then what have you achieved?

Hello, quid. The block quote you give is also at http://projecteuler.net/about

while the NOTE was at the very bottom of http://projecteuler.net/problems after problem number 50

And I was the first, and I too apologize. The reason why I did not immediately "attribute" PE in my post (although I did in 000's post, by referring to it as "PE") is because I didn't want it showing up on search engines so easily (some people complain about PE solutions/spoilers being too easy to find when people conduct Google searches).

PE is just a site people do for fun. They're mathematical/programming challenges. Some people are "purists" and try to solve them without any help whatsoever, while others need some extra pushing in order for them to learn a concept better. Not everyone learns best by being tossed into a shark tank and told to learn to swim (Will Jagy, rather dismissively, told me to "read some books" and yet would not tell me which books I should read, when further inquired). PE is a great place for learning about programming and mathematics, and like 000 said, there are plenty of forums and sites and blogs where members are encouraged to talk about problems (without posting answers or code/code output, of course).

I was not looking for someone to simply solve the problem for me (and it was clear that 000 wasn't after this, either). The problem clearly involves certain mathematical concepts, and I don't think it's plagiarism or academically dishonest to seek advice/help on relevant topics when the sole purpose is to get on the right track for a site that's purely for fun. The staff at PE have that "NOTE" there simply to say "Don't bother us with emails and questions." The PE staff just don't want people posting answers, but that is a far cry from asking how certain mathematical concepts are done. It's the equivalent of getting mad at someone because they want to play their favorite video game with a walkthrough for a particularly tough section of the game instead of spending hours and hours failing, getting frustrated, and quitting. Like I said, it's about learning. Even if I had every single PE problem solved, there's no award or gain for it. The only person you cheat is yourself if you're simply after someone else to solve your problem. I wasn't looking for that. I wanted to learn more about the concept because there isn't a whole lot of literature out there (I've Googled everything about integral lattice points on spheres and Pythagorean quads and found little of use).

Now, it's clear I misunderstood the purpose of MO, and I apologize for that. I just assumed it was a math site where people could ask math questions -- it wasn't immediately obvious that it was a site full of professors geared towards research questions (especially when I see stuff like this http://mathoverflow.net/questions/81011/prime-ideals-in-the-ring-of-germs-of-continuous-functions that seems like a math question no different from the nature of the math question I asked or 000 asked).

Anyways, apologies for any disruptions, otherwise.

I got a reply from an administrator at Project Euler, but posted on their projecteuler.net. I don't appear to have permission to paste anything, so I can just paraphrase by saying that they really, really do not want people posting their questions. They do make a distinction between people who have put in time and effort and then gotten stuck, as opposed to those who do nothing at all and ask for help. The administrator was also disgusted that this happened within 24 hours of the problem being posted there.

So, from the point of view of MO, these are questions for which a complete answer is known. They are not research, they are closer to homework for a well-designed self-study course in programming and mathematical thinking. Background material that might be required for answering a question is typically available in earlier questions. Furthermore, as programming is always a component, insight into the problems ought also to be found by running computer programs on easier test cases.

So, finally, we ought not to answer or give hints.

I was also pointed to this:

http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/1090/re-project-euler-questions
referring to questions there such as
http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/9259/find-the-sum-of-all-the-multiples-of-3-or-5-below-1000

Hi Will,

I am impressed by the effort you put into this. While I maintain that this is neither a case of academic dishonesty nor plagiarism not even close to the two, I'd say if the people running this thing do not want this we should respect it/support it. (However they might consider mentioning this a bit more prominently or explicitly. I did not sign up or anything but I can still see all the questions, and no information suggesting to me this ever could be a problem.)

To DW and 000: Thanks for your efforts in explaining the situation!

@Gerry - heh, I read your comment back-to-front. Was that intentional?

Yes, I know. Just sloppy english.

I asked the administrator "hk" at Project Euler for contact by email, as I felt that I had intruded on their Meta page enough, called forum.projecteuler.net evidently. He gave a careful analysis. The heart of that is "inductive self learning," something for which we usually lack time in lecture courses. He said to google that phrase, and gave the first entry he got that way, http://mate.calpoly.edu/media/files/Review_inductive_learning.pdf by Prince and Felder about engineering education.

He confirms that PE does want its participants both to learn background by doing earlier problems, as well as break down big problems into little ones, and experiment with easier cases. They do not want their participants asking for help elsewhere.