Re: A Problem To Solve :-)

On 4/1/24 05:13, Farley Flud wrote:

On Sun, 31 Mar 2024 19:40:02 -0500, Physfitfreak wrote:
 

>
If the missile computes that 5 fighter jets at time t will exactly be at
these coordinates in the sky:
>
Jet 1: (4.38 km, 3.9 km, 8.1 km)
Jet 2: (5.23 km, 9.61 km, 4.74 km)
Jet 3: (6.93 km, 6.01 km, 6.88 km)
Jet 4: (8.32 km, 2.12 km, 2.5 km)
Jet 5: (2.53 km, 4.23 km, 5.82 km)
>
then answer the following 2 questions:
>
1- what would be the coordinates of the point in the sky, that the
missile with the weakest warhead needs to explode at, at time t, to
damage all those 5 fighter jets critically enough?
>
2- within what minimum radius of that explosion, any fighter jet would
get critically damaged at time t?
>

 AFAIK, this is a very difficult problem.'
 But algorithms have recently been developed.  The best one is, of
course, implemented in FOSS:
 https://github.com/hbf/miniball
 When I get some free time I may try it out.
 

Like most other math or physics problems, one can solve it in very difficult ways too :) Hehe :)
Question is, can you solve it by using nothing other than at most college algebra! No PDE's. No calculus. Just simple college algebra math.
This "Miniball" is interesting though :) But heck, I solved it myself two minutes before concocting the blog post. It took me about half an hour of looking into various approaches to it. That was half an hour of fun that rBrown (future rBowman, after his descendants become brown in the USA) doesn't understand and therefore does not enjoy.
I don't post anything in this blog for which per-written software would be required.