I've not worked through a large book of problems like this before. At risk of sounding silly, are there solutions to the sample problems? I've given a few a go but can't find the answers anywhere to check my work.

▲

AstroBen a day ago | parent | next [-]

I looked into this book before and without solutions it makes it much harder to use for self-study. Maybe LLMs do change that now but I'm not sure I'd trust their output if I were learning the topic

Susanna Epp's Discrete Mathematics With Applications is also a really good option

▲

ky3 a day ago | parent [-]

The logical skills to evaluate the output of a LLM are the same skills brought to bear reading any book. What makes you trust this textbook then? Textbooks are not infallible.

▲

AstroBen a day ago | parent [-]

Good textbooks have gone through expert reviews and multiple iterations of improvement. That can't be said of an LLM answering your personalized questions or the book problem

But why not both?

	▲	ky3 a day ago \| parent [-]
		> Good textbooks have gone through expert reviews and multiple iterations of improvement. That's an assumption increasingly false, unfortunately. The spirit of collegiality has been beaten back. Far better to hone logical skills that sift between fact and error than to rely on social reputation. Ironically we're discussing a text designed to do exactly that. The savvy LLM user already knows to be on the lookout for falsehood, if not bad pedagogy. That's a benefit, not a drawback of LLMs.

▲

sn9 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Math Academy has a comparable Discrete Math course that shows you how to solve every problem after you submit a solution and incorporates spaced repetition.

▲

ky3 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Such problems are a cakewalk for LLMs, you realize? Lots of didactic activities you could do with LLMs.

▲

BeetleB a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I hate to be that guy, but ... frontier LLMs have gotten quite good at problems like these!

I recently was struggling with a linear algebra problem. It wanted me to prove X. If I used one route I could prove X. But then strangely enough, going another route, I disproved X!

I went to Gemini and asked how it could be so, and it pointed out flaws in my proof. Very helpful!

▲

ktallett 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It is not a silly question at all, a companion book with working and answers makes perfect sense. Universities and academic institutions who create things like this were often very wary as they often reuse these questions in classes and alternate the same questions over a span of 5 years. As realistically to test a small module of a subject the actual amount of viable questions in that question pool is rather few.