MeFi post: Getting to the Square Root of this Function

I'd still love if someone could take a stab at explaining why the "magic" constant that was chosen works better than any other random number, like 42 or 17, and what sort of genius process was used to find it.

If you're willing to read (or at least skim) some genuine math, this paper by Chris Lomont (linked to from the main link above, and elsewhere in the thread) walks through the whole thing. There's are some CS 101 ideas in there that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 3:16 PM on February 8, 2008

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