Talk:Jeep problem

Jeep problem was a Mathematics good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
September 7, 2009	Good article nominee	Not listed

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on October 18, 2008.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that the jeep problem is a mathematical problem in which a jeep must maximise the distance it can travel into a desert with a given amount of fuel?

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Jeep problem/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Protonk's review

Images

No serious problem with either but I feel they would be much more informative were they to scale. Meaning only that 1/6th should be 1/3rd the size of 1/2 and 1/2 should be twice the size of 1/4. This is more noticeable on the second image, File:Jeep problem 2.png.
- File:jeep_problem.svg has been redrawn to scale. cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 23:26, 16 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Our image use policies used to suggest that images alternate right-left-right. It appears that is no longer the case, though it might be nice to have the images alternate here.
Wikipedia:ACCESS#Images says that the latex equations bounded by <math> need alt text. Wikipedia:Alternative text for images also states that alt text should be provided for images that doesn't duplicate the caption.
Robert McNamara has a bunch of PD pictures of him should you desire to add them.

Major issues

The lede is too short. See WP:LEDE for some suggestions on length. An article like this can have a relatively short lede, but it must summarize all major content points in the article.
The McNamara section is tricky. The basic point in the quote is valuable--McNamara is obviously describing a problem identical to the Jeep Problem. However the annotations we provide aren't necessarily accurate. Island Hopping in WWII came about as a response to Japanese fortification of specific islands in Oceania. The Allies responded by bypassing some of those islands and seizing other, strategically important ones. The seizure of saipan and tinian allowed the use of those planes, but was not necessarily prompted solely or largely by the concerns over fuel. Nor were concerns about the flights to China motivated entirely by fuel consumption. Had the Marshall Islands never been siezed the AAF would have probably flown tanker aircraft after tanker aircraft to supply bases in china in order to bomb Japan. Moreover, the devastation to Japan (As Fog of War details) was wrought mostly through conventional arms, not the two nuclear weapons used. Operation Matterhorn describes some of the ideas behind the campaign. I think that the section can and should remain, but it has to be rewritten in order to get closer to the facts. Tantalizingly, Fine's paper hints at an unpublished solution by Leonidas Alaoglu which specifically references flights over the Hump.
The article itself is arguably incomplete. David Gale's article on variations on the jeep problem is not mentioned, nor is Joel Franklin's generalized solution noted, nor are other flavors. The mathword article also presents a solution (though they punt the proof off to a cited book) relating the gamma function to the jeep problem (though arguably this is kinda covered in the article by mentioning harmonic numbers). It doesn't describe the thought process by which Fine came to the solution he did or the process behind possible alternative solutions. The same article of the AMM which published fine also published a commentary on his paper where a more general solution was forwarded (see here). Also, the solutions portion is more of a set of illustrations. I don't think that we necessarily have to present proofs, but for a problem like this it might be helpful.

Overall

I'm not going to list specific line-by-line suggestions for the article itself because I feel that it requires a substantial rewrite before it becomes a good article. I will, however place the article on hold rather than failing it because I think such a rewrite could be undertaken in a few weeks with relative ease. Thanks for letting me dig into a fun corner of mathematics with this article and good luck getting it to GA! Protonk (talk) 20:49, 13 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm failing this article as the issues haven't been resolved in a timely manner (and there doesn't appear to be much change to the article itself). Protonk (talk) 05:56, 7 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for taking the time to do such a detailed review. Gandalf61 (talk) 09:12, 7 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Jeep problem/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

Someone should watch the Fog of War movie and fix the quote: it appears to be machine-extracted on the source cited and has quite a few "bugs". Pcap ping 17:13, 14 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Last edited at 17:13, 14 August 2009 (UTC). Substituted at 02:15, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

citation issue

Source #6 no longer seems to link to the correct page. 2600:1700:F7F0:2290:2D35:5FE3:56D9:D0E3 (talk) 00:06, 1 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sources needing improvement

The citations to the variants of the Jeep problem are from geeksforgeeks, mathforum , and mathsisfun. Their analyses in the solution section are entirely unreferenced. Some better sources are needed for these. Mys_721tx (talk) 06:55, 16 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]