The Two Egg Problem
datagenetics.com
The Two Egg Problem
1–10 of 87 posts
Re: The Two Egg Problem
#2The blog author is very smart.
However, he is not very clever.
From my experience in the real world, I know that an unprotected egg will smash when dropped from one story, guaranteed. No need to go up 14 or 27 or even two stories.
(I also know that it is possible to devise protective enclosures to keep an egg from breaking when dropped from 6 stories. The Society of Women Engineers often sponsors competitions. Been there, got the T-shirt.)
Re: The Two Egg Problem
#3The blog author is very smart. However, he is not very clever. From my experience in the real world, I know that an unprotected egg will smash when dropped from one story, guaranteed. No need to go up 14 or 27 or even two stories. (I also know that it is possible to devise protective enclosures to keep an egg from breaking when dropped from 6 stories. The Society of Women Engineers often sponsors competitions. Been t…
Yeah. I dropped an egg from the kitchen counter and it broke. Ergo, first floor it would break.
Except of course, the article doesn't mention what the landing surface is, or whether it is what we think of as an egg, or some hypothetical super-egg. This would seem to be discounted by the "There are no tricks, gotchas or other devious ruses" clause, however. If the point of the article is to make it purely a mathematical problem, then pretty much anything except an egg would work, like "A strong box".
Otherwise, it's pretty much a "work out this problem but automatically disregard anything that I don't think should be part of the solution" interview question, that whilst I have no doubt are asked by many middle manager interviewers, would imagine is a little below microsoft or google.
Re: The Two Egg Problem
#4Wouldn't the absolute best way (assuming you have never seen an egg before and do not know anything about eggs) would be to try and crush one egg in a vice grip to determine the strength of the outer structure and then infer a fuzzy-ish height/speed limit from that?
Re: The Two Egg Problem
#5The blog author is very smart. However, he is not very clever. From my experience in the real world, I know that an unprotected egg will smash when dropped from one story, guaranteed. No need to go up 14 or 27 or even two stories. (I also know that it is possible to devise protective enclosures to keep an egg from breaking when dropped from 6 stories. The Society of Women Engineers often sponsors competitions. Been t…
Yeah. I dropped an egg from the kitchen counter and it broke. Ergo, first floor it would break. Except of course, the article doesn't mention what the landing surface is, or whether it is what we think of as an egg, or some hypothetical super-egg. This would seem to be discounted by the "There are no tricks, gotchas or other devious ruses" clause, however. If the point of the article is to make it purely a mathematic…
All it would take to remove the real-world problem would be to change the object from an egg to a ball made of a material of unknown strength and toughness.
Poor specifications lie at the root of many a programming problem.
Re: The Two Egg Problem
#6Wouldn't the absolute best way (assuming you have never seen an egg before and do not know anything about eggs) would be to try and crush one egg in a vice grip to determine the strength of the outer structure and then infer a fuzzy-ish height/speed limit from that?
"There are no tricks, gotchas or other devious ruses. Don’t rat-hole with issues related to terminal velocity, potential energy or wind resistance. This is a math puzzle plain and simple."
Not within the rules!
Re: The Two Egg Problem
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. I dropped an egg from the kitchen counter and it broke. Ergo, first floor it would break. Except of course, the article doesn't mention what the landing surface is, or whether it is what we think of as an egg, or some hypothetical super-egg. This would seem to be discounted by the "There are no tricks, gotchas or other devious ruses" clause, however. If the point of the article is to make it purely a mathematic…
All it would take to remove the real-world problem would be to change the object from an egg to a ball made of a material of unknown strength and toughness. Poor specifications lie at the root of many a programming problem.
It's a fake egg made up of a material of unknown strength and toughness. Alternatively, it is made up of the brain of a thousand people who find irrelevant questions about logic puzzles - they are made of similar material!
Re: The Two Egg Problem
#8Wouldn't the absolute best way (assuming you have never seen an egg before and do not know anything about eggs) would be to try and crush one egg in a vice grip to determine the strength of the outer structure and then infer a fuzzy-ish height/speed limit from that?
"There are no tricks, gotchas or other devious ruses. Don’t rat-hole with issues related to terminal velocity, potential energy or wind resistance. This is a math puzzle plain and simple." Not within the rules!
"There are no tricks, gotchas or other devious ruses. Don’t rat-hole with issues related to terminal velocity, potential energy or wind resistance. This is a math puzzle plain and simple."
Not out of the rules either (according to what you just posted). At some point you need to crush an egg.
If the rules are implying that you can only do X and we are only looking for solution Y then why are we even talking about this? We may as well have a discussion about trains leaving from Chicago and New York and debate what city they will intersect from on a given day.
Re: The Two Egg Problem
#9The blog author is very smart. However, he is not very clever. From my experience in the real world, I know that an unprotected egg will smash when dropped from one story, guaranteed. No need to go up 14 or 27 or even two stories. (I also know that it is possible to devise protective enclosures to keep an egg from breaking when dropped from 6 stories. The Society of Women Engineers often sponsors competitions. Been t…
The author didn't create the problem, he just wrote about it :)
Re: The Two Egg Problem
#10I blogged a solution in German in 2008: http://bjoernguenzel.de/2008/03/18/weiteres-matheratsel-die-...