Bay 12 Games Forum

Yeah. This is basically the ideal situation to research something like this. You have people who may or may not be NPD and what you think may be an indicator of it in a largely controlled environment.

For once, Lyte's PhD in Psychology is actually directly pertinent. Experimental design and execution is huge, and the entire point of a PhD is to show you can do that.

BGH is basically the giant check. It keeps decks that do nothing but play fatass bodies like Handlock from being impossible for control decks to deal with. It serves a purpose, although it may be too good at it.

Secretdin doesn't counter every deck. I don't think there are any matchups where it has more than 65% winrate or so, and mage decks are hardly made to counter it.

But fuck Divine Favor.

The thing about the Uthertree is that it has a sufficient amount of unfairness mechanics to make it unreasonable, except for the part where Patron Warrior basically made it cry along with all the other aggro decks Patron deleted from the metagame.

Now with no Patron to loom and menace aggro decks, basically the only thing that consistently beats it are the various mage decks, particularly mech mage. And so the cycle of aggro continues.

Pseudoedit: Also what Ispil said. Markers tend to be anal about simplification at this level of calc.

My experience is the opposite. Once you get to calculus, it's all about the process, not about algebra. Usually if your answer is an unsimplified form, they'll accept it. The answer is only 1 point anyways.

I would ask your school if they have TI-89s to loan out, then. If they don't, then it's probable they won't have any questions that require a calculator.

Generally speaking, if you're allowed a calculator on the test/problem, just writing d/dy (f(x)) = whatever is sufficient.

He hasn't gotten to implicit differentiation yet, I would assume given that he's only just not learning dy/dx(e^x) and chain rule. His teacher is almost certainly looking for the standard differentiation method.

Chain rule has to be applied for every single function. In that case, your equation can be broken down into 3 distinct functions that you must differentiate sequentially.
y = f(g(h(x))), f(x) = 2^x, g(x) = sin(x), h(x) = pi*x. To apply chainrule, you work sequentially outside in.

For f(x) = 2^x, you have a form of a^x, whose derivative rule is d(a^x )/dx = a^x * ln(a). In this case, that becomes 2^"x" * ln(2). I single out the x there, because it's important to remember that your "x" there is actually g(h(x)), which is sin(pi*x), so your current form becomes 2^(sin(pi*x)) *ln(2). Then you do chain rule.

For g(x) = sin(x), d/dx = cos(x), no transformation needed. So now you multiply that with your f(x). 2^(sin(pi*x)) * ln(2) * cos("x"). Again, remember that "x" in what you just added is h(x), so pi*x. Your total form is now 2^(sin(pi*x)) * ln(2) * cos(pi*x). Then you do chain rule again.

For h(x) = pi*x, d/dx = pi. This is a form of d(ax)/dx = a. You should be able to recognize that a constant times x's derivative is always the constant. So then you multiply in that derivative, and you get your final answer, 2^(sin(pi*x)) * ln(2) * cos(pi*x) * pi.

You can check this answer by putting it into your TI-89's derivative function, or on an online calculator such as WolframAlpha, like this. If you did everything right, what you have should be equivalent to that. In this case, your ln(2) and pi are shuffled around which is fine thanks to commutative property of multiplication.

EDIT: Interesting. I learned a new bbcodes shorthand today.