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Overthinking

aentan.com

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Re: Overthinking

#31

Post by hiromichan »

Uhm I guess it's about common sense and not being an engineer all the time!!

If someone would call a pizza place in reality saying they wanted 11 equal pieces, they would have answered that at most they could have the pizza cut in some slices! :D HA!

Re: Overthinking

#32

Post by MaxGabriel »

oskarth wrote: post #5

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…

Ok, only did a few minutes research but intuitively it doesn't make sense to me that ballpoint pens a) work in space but b) don't work upside down. There wouldn't be an upside down in space because of 0 gravity.

Unless the author means upside down on earth?

Re: Overthinking

#33

Post by dubya »

anthonyb wrote: post #14
thaumaturgy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

or just loop the string over 1 finger 11 times?

I think the string thing is inaccurate enough (try it!) that you might as well just eye-ball it. If accuracy mattered, I would make a paper circle of about the size of the pizza, divide into twelve (sixteen would work too) slices, remove one (or five), and adjust the spaces between them until they looked about equal. Then slice between the paper pieces. If I were in a pizza shop, I'd probably just use actual pizza slices.

Re: Overthinking

#34

Post by nik_0_0 »

xarien wrote: post #16

I solved the second one in a couple minutes in my head with value substitutions. Unless you were to do with with a pen and paper, it'd be pretty difficult to pick up on the closed loops. 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…

Similar way here, given 0000, 1111, 2222, 3333, 5555, 6666, 7777, 9999, we know the value of each number except for 4 and 8, disregard 4 (not in any value), sub those values in to any slot with an 8, and you get the answer.

If the alternative to overthinking would be staring at this looking for a pattern until you realize it is the number of loops, then that is not something I am interested in :)

Re: Overthinking

#36

Post by aqme28 »

anthonyb wrote: post #14
thaumaturgy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

or just loop the string over 1 finger 11 times?

Since the string is of a fixed length, that only works if you finger's diameter is 1/11 of the pizza's diameter.

Re: Overthinking

#37

Post by lifeformed »

I figured out the number one in about 30 seconds. The biggest clue is that it claims preschoolers get it easily. That means all mathematical operations, except addition and less likely subtraction, is out of the question. A quick glance showed that adding or subtracting in any simple way would not yield a result - a more complicated way would not be done by a preschooler. So that meant it probably was some sort of spacial or visual problem. Seeing 6666=4 and 0000=4 got me thinking about the shapes of the numbers, and from there I quickly determined the answer was the number of closed loops.

Re: Overthinking

#39

Post by napierzaza »

Ugh, the government did not finance the space pen. It was a private company that attached their product to space exploration. It was the space age after all. They are nice pens, they even write under water. I am also blown away that the author saw this first in that movie and didn't hear it absolutely everywhere first (usually crediting Russian cosmonauts as the smarter ones).

Re: Overthinking

#40

Post by dkarl »

Nobody really needs to divide a pizza into eleven pieces with such precision. It's presented as a "real" situation, but it's a classic type of mathematical problem, the constraints of which are entirely made up for fun. When he dismisses the geometrical solution as "overthinking" and a sign of a lack of creativity, he not only misses the point, he's mocking what other people do for fun. Nice.

Also, as someone else already pointed out, he didn't specify how to find the middle point of the pizza, so his answer isn't a complete practical solution anyway.

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