The 12 megabyte ideal

Math has funny ways of unpacking itself. I was playing with a fairly simple example, the surface defined by x^3+y^3+z^3=1, and suddenly the answer the question I asked the computer was not an a handful of one line equations, but a list of equations that made a 12MB text file. It didn't shed any light. The feeling was not unlike missing a turn on a mountain bike and going ass over teakettle into the bushes.