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Cleo, the mathematician that tricked Stack Exchange

en.wikipedia.org

69 points by schaum 7 months ago · 10 comments

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Suppafly 7 months ago

>This investigation identified several suspicious profiles that frequently interacted with Cleo, including those of Vladimir Reshetnikov and Laila Podlesny.

Is the assumption that Vladimir posed as Laila to post the, presumably already solved problems, and then posed as Cleo to 'answer' them quickly? Wiki doesn't come out and make this accusation, but the apparent connection between the 3 accounts makes it seem like that's the case.

  • krackers 7 months ago
    • em-bee 7 months ago

      in this thread someone commented

      1. People love correcting other people. If you want to get an answer, don’t ask for the solution — instead, post a (possibly) wrong answer under a different pseudonym. People will then want to prove you wrong. 2. Even more so if you’re a woman.

      that comment was flagged, and while on the face of it, without further context, that may be reasonable, the video in the above linked thread reveals that engaging people to post an answer was in fact the motivation for creating the cleo account, essentially supporting the statement made in the flagged comment.

ktallett 7 months ago

As someone who struggles slightly with maths despite working in physics and engineering, I am always in awe of those who can do math so easily. You do occasionally come across those who can do math with minimal intermediate steps and it is mind blowing to watch.

  • Suppafly 7 months ago

    I think he was doing the intermediate steps, but just posting the answer to draw out other people to do the intermediate steps, to see how other people were approaching it.

    • v9v 7 months ago

      The way I had understood it was that the author arrived at these problems by incrementally modifying complicated integral formulas just up to the point where Mathematica couldn't solve them, and then used the solution from Mathematica for the previous iteration, his intuition and some ad-hoc methods to make an educated guess for the answer for the "unsolvable" integral. I suppose those can be called intermediate steps, but not in the usual sense.

dnlserrano 7 months ago

cool. reads like a Benjamin Labatut book

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