I thought this was quite funny/clever.

[blangela]

I apologize for being somewhat off topic, but I cannot resist making
this post.

One of my less gifted students submitted a better solution for the
tictactoe problem I had assigned than I expected from him. I thought
I would do a quick search on the internet to see if he might have
found the solution there. I found this response on another forum to a
student asking for help on his assignment:

"No, sadly no one has yet been able to solve the so called 'tic-tac-
toe'
paradox. Despite my best efforts during 12 years of research, I have
still not come up with a satisfactory solution. There is currently a
group of scientists at MIT, who claim to be close to a solution, you
may want to contact them at (e-mail address removed)."

Now if everyone else would do the same, I would have less concerns
about who has done who's homework assignment.

Bob L.

 

[Jim Langston]

I apologize for being somewhat off topic, but I cannot resist making
this post.

One of my less gifted students submitted a better solution for the
tictactoe problem I had assigned than I expected from him. I thought
I would do a quick search on the internet to see if he might have
found the solution there. I found this response on another forum to a
student asking for help on his assignment:

"No, sadly no one has yet been able to solve the so called 'tic-tac-
toe'
paradox. Despite my best efforts during 12 years of research, I have
still not come up with a satisfactory solution. There is currently a
group of scientists at MIT, who claim to be close to a solution, you
may want to contact them at (e-mail address removed)."

Now if everyone else would do the same, I would have less concerns
about who has done who's homework assignment.

Actually, this newsgroup is one of the better ones requesting people to do
their own homework. A while back someone actually responded with code for a
homework topic, but everyone thought it had to be a joke with all the bugs
it contained, that it was thought that the person who responded had figured
if they gave them code bad enough then they'd learn trying to fix it.

Unfortunately, or fortunately as the case may be, it turns out the responder
just didn't write code that good himself.

I remember one response a while back with someone giving code where was
hidden in the program something such as "I'm lame and don't do my own
homework."

Sometimes the OP will acutally come back with an attempt in code which we
help them fix.