It is often very useful to practise mathematics by automatically generated exercises. One approach is multiple choice quizzes (MCQ), but it turns out to be fairly difficult to generate authentic wrong answers. Instead, we want the user to input the answer and be able to parse the answer and check whether this is the correct answer. There are many fun challenges in this, e.g. to verify that 2 is equal to 1 + 1 (as text strings the two are different, but mathematically they are equal, at least to a convenient approximation in this case).