Ask HN - Can any mathematicians help me out?

20 points by tren 14y ago ↗ HN

I've created a site that allows people to post math and science problems for money, the problem is I don't have enough mathematicians to solve the problems. Here is an example of a question for $500 - http://zombal.com/zomb/scientific-calculation/relevance-equation-formula-for-comparing-objects . If anyone thinks they could answer this guy's question or knows of anyone who could, please take a look.

6 comments

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muyyatin 14y ago ↗

The question looks extraordinarily vague. It doesn't seem to be written by someone with a large amount of math knowledge, as they want a "variable that allows us to change the weight given to either half of the equation." where the weight nor the equation is described.

tren 14y ago ↗

Yes it does seem quite vague, but I know he's legitimate as he's bought $500 worth of credits on the site. If you contact him or post a clarification I'm sure he'll explain what he's after a bit further.

mooism2 14y ago ↗

It doesn't say $500 on the page you link to, it says Q500.

The site only pays out in USD, so I'm not interested. Try reposting when America wakes up?

revorad 14y ago ↗

See if you can advertise on http://mathoverflow.net

tren 14y ago ↗

Thanks, I'll try that out

cjg 14y ago ↗

This seems more like a computer science question to me.

It can be thought of as a k-nearest-neighbour problem. The exact details of his problem could be expressed as a metric.

What he is asking for is naively trivial; compare the target to every object and see which ones are closest. If you want decent performance with large datasets, however, you would be better off using a more sophisticated approach. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-nearest_neighbor_algorithm for more details.