11–20 of 96 posts
Here's a classic article about that game, dating back to 1977, describing Bill Gates trying to figure it out: http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm
Well, my pizza solution would have been to find a measuring tape and divide the circumference by eleven with your phone calculator ;) But is it our problem to over think everything. School, university, bureaucracy, everything we encounter in life pushes us into that direction. Probably to stop us from getting killed. Something evolutionary...
I totally want to work on an augmented reality cake divider now. Point phone at cake to get a divider overlay.
The space pen affair is a well known urban myth, see for example http://io9.com/5838635/the-million-dollar-space-pen-hoax The second example is funny but it is a classic example of misdirection. It is made out to be about mathematics but has got nothing to with it. How exactly is that about overthinking something? The third example is a ingenious solution by the author himself, a solution that is the product of think…
The part about the string made me smile a bit, because I guess there aren't too many climbers on Quora. As any salty old trad climber knows, it only takes a couple of wraps around an object before the rope (or string in this case) becomes fixed to the object. So unless you're lucky, the process would actually look like: take string, make space between thumb and index finger, wrap some number of ... oh, darn, it didn'…
Generating the following list took less than 30 secs when I looked it over, so obviously the example of it taking a long time to solve is a bit contrived. What threw me off a bit at first was that the number 4 was not used at all. I spent a little time trying to figure out why that was excluded before moving on.
0 = 1 1 = 0 2 = 0 3 = 0 5 = 0 6 = 1 7 = 0 8 = 2 9 = 1
The space pen affair is a well known urban myth, see for example http://io9.com/5838635/the-million-dollar-space-pen-hoax The second example is funny but it is a classic example of misdirection. It is made out to be about mathematics but has got nothing to with it. How exactly is that about overthinking something? The third example is a ingenious solution by the author himself, a solution that is the product of think…
Who cares about pens and pencils, use an ipad :) Overthinking leads to over-enginnering, because humans aren't great at knowing what to do with all the free time we'd have if we did our job in 10% of the time :) Perhaps overthinking is required to keep us busy. Even though we all claim our time is money, in reality most get paid by the hour and not by the amount of work that has been accomplished. Plus complexity giv…
Prior knowledge. Yes. Exactly what I was telling. I gave the numbers question to some of my friends and they all seem to be crippled by their prior knowledge. I was thinking about the iPad too. I wonder what astronauts are using now. Surely not the space pen.
strange how our pattern recognition gets worse with age ... I wonder if prior knowledge actually messes with the pattern recognition functions in the brain somehow ...
That said, the "pre-school children" bit was a big hint as to how to approach it.
The use of '=' instead of, say, '→' made the math pedant in me twitch, though ;)
I'm probably an idiot, but how do you divide the string in 11 equal pieces without measuring the length and dividing by 11?
I suspect you don't even have to mark the string with a pen (meaning the author possibly overthought the solution). You can just use the gap between your fingers. The chances are that the additional length added by the circumference of your fingers probably compensates for the curvature of the pizza circumference, depending on the size of the pizza and the size of your fingers. If you're doing this regularly you'll quickly learn the appropriate degree of compensation.