June 22, 2026
Past You just ratioed Present You
My Mathematical Regression
Man finds old school answer, internet argues if his younger self was genius or just lucky
TLDR: A programmer reopened an old school math puzzle file and discovered his younger self solved it with a neat shortcut instead of code. The internet loved the nostalgia, joked about ancient lost wisdom, and then immediately started fighting over whether his old answer was brilliant insight or an unproven guess.
A developer went digging through a 10-year-old folder of math puzzle answers and got hit with the most relatable plot twist on the internet: past me was smarter than current me. He expected to find messy code and brute-force trial-and-error. Instead, he found a tiny text file calmly saying the answer to a grid-path puzzle could be solved without programming at all. Cue existential crisis, nostalgic self-dragging, and a joking comparison to finding wisdom from some lost ancient civilization — except the “ancient” was just him in college.
And the comments? That’s where the real show started. One crowd loved the elegant shortcut and rushed in to explain it in simple terms: if you need to move right and down a set number of times, the only thing that matters is the order. Another commenter flexed in the funniest possible way by solving it in bc, an old-school calculator tool, because apparently starting Python was just too much drama that day. Very “I didn’t bring a laptop charger so I forged a sword instead.”
But the thread also turned spicy fast. Several commenters basically said, hold on, spotting a pattern is not the same as proving it. One warned that this kind of confidence can be “dangerous” because patterns don’t always keep behaving nicely. Another flatly said extending a pattern without proof “is not really a solution.” So yes: what began as a sweet little memory trip became a full-on debate over whether younger-you was a math wizard, a lucky guesser, or both.
Key Points
- •The author revisited a 10-year-old repository of Project Euler solutions and found a file named `problem15.txt`.
- •Unlike the surrounding Python solutions, `problem15.txt` solved the problem without writing any program.
- •The old solution listed small examples for 1x1, 2x2, and 3x3 grids and identified the pattern as **(2n choose n)**.
- •Applying the formula to a 20x20 grid gave the result **137846528820**.
- •The article contrasts the author's current instinct to use Python and dynamic programming with their earlier direct mathematical approach.