Talk:Five-room puzzle

Non-mathematical(?) proof

I have two comments to make about this very nicely written new section. First of all I would not say that this proof is non-mathematical. It is a rephrasing, in a special case, of Euler's general argument using language very similar to his (he would not have talked about multigraphs and Euler circuits). I am also not sure what a non-mathematical proof would be; that looks like an oxymoron to me (I have a very narrow definition of proof in mind). My second concern is that, even though I very much like the treatment, it does appear to violate WP:OR. I would hope that this could be massaged a bit and a citation found for it. Bill Cherowitzo (talk) 19:04, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

I bow to your superior knowledge regarding whether or not this proof should be considered mathematical. My goal was to make it accessible to most people and, as we know, most people are put off by and know very little about mathematics. I will not contest an edit to correct what you perceive to be a problem with this section. I thought about the WP:OR issue before I made the addition. I decided to proceed because the prohibition of original work is already largely ignored in many technical articles. For example, articles that describe algorithms frequently include an implementation of the algorithm, in some computer language, as part of the article. The prohibition notwithstanding, in my opinion this vastly improves the utility of the article. I will not contest your removal of the section, but perhaps you could consider whether the article, as a whole, is more or less useful as a result of its addition. GrahamDavies (talk) 20:34, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

I believe that I have found a citation to support your passage and I've made a couple of minor changes. Bill Cherowitzo (talk) 18:08, 19 February 2014 (UTC)