From cosell@bbn.com Sat Dec 8 15:48:28 1990 Return-Path: Received: from WILMA.BBN.COM by life.ai.mit.edu (4.1/AI-4.10) id AA24247; Sat, 8 Dec 90 15:48:28 EST Message-Id: <9012082048.AA24247@life.ai.mit.edu> Date: Sat, 8 Dec 90 15:42:21 EST From: Bernie Cosell To: Peter Beck Cc: cube-lovers@life.ai.mit.edu Subject: Re: rec & ed computing Sure.... - REC is VERY slanted toward high school students, and so there is very little advanced or profound stuff in there. - While there is a nod to other worlds, primarily it is all in BASIC, and generally focused on the IBM PC. - There is a fascination with mindless crunching just to print out numbers that I can't fathom. A good portion of the articles center on a numbers with some odd property or another, or finding the actual _numeric_ solution to something and usually brute force [or close to it]. The graphics hacks, such as they are, are primarily crunching-based [moire patterns and such]. No real discussion of 'puzzles', for example, nor of the kinds of techniques and such you need to partially-tame one of those awful [but real world] exponential searches, nor of representing 3D objects or manipulations of them, or search strategies, no word problems, etc. /Bernie\