OT: Interesting math problem...

[Will]

geoschmo said:
Will, that's a good thourough proof there, but I'm curious why you "discount V=0 as uninteresting". Maybe that's a math thing I don't get, but it seems V=0 is just as valid a posibility as V=9 until it's proven or disproven. In fact I did disprove V=0 in this case, in a very similer fasion to how you proved V=9.

Well, I didn't really elaborate it very well. You have to look ahead a bit to see that V = 0 leads to the trivial (non-distinct) solution of 00000 + 00000 = 00000. While it's not immediately obvious that this is the case, since I don't know of a proof that would be less than your about 9 step proof, there is also a sort of mathematical intuition there, that there already is a trivial solution for zeros, and a non-trivial solution most likely will not have the zeros. But, overall, I was just looking to solve it quickly, elegantly, and I determined that rather than proving V != 0, and doing most of the problem twice, I would just ignore that possibility, and go with the more "interesting" one. And, usually, that works