Solve Physics exercise by brute force approach..

Question

Being unable to reproduce a given result. (either because it's wrong or because I was doing something wrong) I was asking myself if it would be easy to just write a small program which takes all the constants and given number and permutes it with a possible operators (* / - + exp(..)) etc) until the result is found.

Permutations of n distinct objects with repetition allowed is n^r. At least as long as r is small I think you should be able to do this. I wonder if anybody did something similar here..

Answer 1

Yes, it has been done here: Code Golf: All +-*/ Combinations for 3 integers

However, because a formula gives the desired result doesn't guarantee that it's the correct formula. Also, you don't learn anything by just guessing what to do to get to the desired result.

Answer 2

If you're trying to fit some data with a function whose form is uncertain, you can try using Eureqa.