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A comment on Recognizing when two arithmetic expressions are essentially the same.

Re:Recognizing when two arithmetic expressions are essential... by Animats on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @03:55PM (#15075815)
Within its domain, that's what the Oppen-Nelson simplifier did. Many provers since can do that.

Amusingly, Plato, the first on-line teaching system, had a solver for that. It was used to check student's answers to math problems. It worked by plugging in some random numeric values and evaluating. If many sets of random values evaluated the same as the desired answer, it was accepted as equivalent.

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Re:Recognizing when two arithmetic expressions are essential... by Ar-Curunir on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @07:19PM (#15077175)
what kind of math problems were the students supposed to solve? I ask because the approach you mention is still the best way we have of determining whether two polynomials are equivalent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynomial_identity_testing

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Re:Recognizing when two arithmetic expressions are essential... by Animats on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @12:16AM (#15078489)
Basic high school and college math.
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