Gary Coffman wrote in message . ..
On 7 Jul 2003 02:35:54 -0700, (Michael Rainey) wrote:
(DoN. Nichols) wrote in message ...
I think that what he wanted to do is enter the OD and the
desired weight, and have it come up with an ID for his hollow sphere to
get the right weight.

If that's the case, would it be a capability that a lot of folks would benefit from?

Seems likely it would be useful to casters. Might be useful to others
too, if they were trying to build something that would float.

I like your program as is, but it could be somewhat more generally
useful if you allowed any fields to be inputs and any fields to be
outputs, depending on where the user plugged in numbers. In other
words, if it could solve for any missing numbers once enough
numbers had been input to give a unique solution.

That's a pretty ambitious requirement, though. Some of the
equation engines (Mathcad, TKsolver, etc) can do it, but it
isn't a simple programming task since the engine has to be
able to determine when it has enough information to arrive
at a unique solution for a given shape.

Gary

I thought about it some after Jerry's sphere question popped up. Aside
from the unquestioned value of being able to "force" one dimension so
as to arrive at a given weight, would you ever actually reduce the
total number of entries? It seems to me that the last dimension would
always have to await the evaluation of the second to last. And not
having to input the last would be cancelled by having to manually
input the weight.

I'm not a mathematician, just a hobbyist programmer. It would be
great to hear some other thoughts on this.


Mike