You'd be surprised. It really depends on how you define the problem and what your goal is. My goal with bidicalc what to find ONE solution. This makes the problem somewhat possible since when there are an infinity of solution, the goal is just to converge to one. For example solving 100 = X + Y with both X and Y unknown sounds impossible in general, but finding one solution is not so difficult. The idea is that any further constraint that would help choose between the many solutions should be expressed by the user in the spreadsheet itself, rather than hardcoded in the backwards solver.
> What kind of problems can you solve backwardly?
This is the weakness of the project honestly! I made it because I was obsessed with the idea and wanted it to exist, not because I was driven by any use case. You can load some premade examples in the app, but I haven't found any killer use case for it yet. I'm just glad it exists now. You can enter any arbitrary DAG of formulas, update any value, input or output, and everything will update upstream and downstream from your edit and remain valid. That's just extremely satisfying to me.
Have you looked into prolog/datalog? You're dancing around many of the same ideas, including backwards execution, constraint programming, stratification, and finding possible values. Here's a relevant example of someone solving a problem like this in prolog:
You might dig into an operations research textbook, there are a number of problems solved with linear programming techniques which might make sense for your interface... In fact might be more intuitive for people that way and with commercial potential.
I am not sure if I know what I am talking about or if it counts in this scenario but constraint solvers come to mind. I am mainly familiar with them in a CAD context so I am struggling to think of a use for them in a spreadsheet context. But I think being able to say given these endpoints find me some values that fit could be a very valuable tool.
But like I said I am not sure that I know what I am talking about and I may be confusing backwards calculation with algebraic engines. I would love for algebra solvers to be a first class object in more languages.
I implemented bi-directional solving in a very simple "Proportion Bar" app --- sort of --- one side would calculate at the specified scaling factor (so 100% could do unit conversions), the other would calculate the scaling factor necessary to make the two sides agree.
Announcement in X [1].
"""
Today, at the
@DARPA
expMath kickoff, we launched , an open source and state of the art autoformalization agent harness for developers and practitioners to accelerate progress at the frontier.
It is stronger, faster, and more cost-efficient than off-the-shelf alternatives. On FormalQualBench, running with a 4-hour timeout, it beats
@HarmonicMath's Aristotle agent with no time limit.
Users of OpenGauss can interact with it as much or as little as they want, can easily manage many subagents working in parallel, and can extend / modify / introspect OpenGauss because it is permissively open-source. OpenGauss was developed in close collaboration with maintainers of leading open-source AI tooling for Lean.
"""
We've seen multiple ideas/products get quickly absorbed into frontier models, OSS, or well-funded startups. The cycle from "interesting idea" to "commoditized feature" is getting very short. Personally, there were three of these in the last year.
And even if your product is genuinely great, distribution is becoming the real bottleneck. Discovery via prompting or search is limited, and paid acquisition is increasingly expensive.
One alternative is to loop between build and kill, letting usage emerge organically rather than trying to force distribution.
AGI may be a prerequisite for true superintelligence, but we're already seeing superhuman performance in narrow domains. We probably need a broader evaluation framework that captures both.
A self-hosted VPN server manager: a TypeScript/Hono backend that runs on your own VPS, paired with a SwiftUI iOS/macOS app. It lets you provision cloud servers across multiple providers (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr), manage them via a Tailscale-secured connection with TLS pinning, and control an OpenClaw gateway.
I will open source it soon in few weeks, as I have still complete few more features.
I didn't look at code. In addition to code, I have CI and CD built in. I becomes hard add features after a while, if you cannot have built in CI/CD that will catch regression.
You didn't look at the code, so you don't know what you're really working with. Maybe it's total slop. This is concerning since you're dealing with security and presumably API keys to third-party platforms.
It's important to build a local dev environment that GSD can iterate on. Once I have done that, I just discuss with GSD and few hours later features land.
I sometimes feel a bit weird about this. In the 90s it felt like "we" won the crypto wars: PGP, the fight over export controls, the Clipper Chip, etc. There was a strong sense that privacy and strong crypto had become settled questions.
I think you could start saying that there are multiple options. The simpler is sharing the sheets in Google (or Microsoft) Sheets. After this, Then, I would have asked if there are any security and/or compliance issue to doing so to analyze other alternatives.
This is the first release. They test the market and optimize. BTW, I have an old M1 with 8gb and works well for some kind of [light?] development. Not using xcode but vscode.
reply