… there is no reason to feel that someone must be “bad at math” to make mistakes. Clearly, if a mathematician can have a foggy day, then so can others. It doesn’t mean you’re “bad at math.”
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As much as I like puzzles, I’ve come to think of math as about the ultimate puzzle. Not in the sense of it being confusing (because by its nature it aims at reducing confusion and creating clarity), but in the sense that it has logical rules but requires creativity to understand and use in any meaningful sense . [...] There are many things to be aware of when doing these kinds of “tests.” First is that they are a scam to get you to give them your cell phone number, so they can then spam you with tons of crap you are not interested in. [...] My team-mate (my wife) and I had been stumped by a corner of the puzzle from last Friday. It was driving us nuts (who the heck is Al Leitner?). Anyway, we usually get ‘em all within a day or two, but this one was tough, so I hit the web and googled some clues. I don’t like to cheat (OK, I do, but my wife has a little more backbone than I, and she usually won’t let me look up an answer until we’ve given it a few days). [...]
Original Photo by Norsehorse Edited by Brian Ah, I love it when readers beat me to the punch! The comments to the original post pretty much sum up the paradox and it’s solution very well. Khaled’s and Mark’s comments illustrate perfectly one of the things I wanted to point out about this puzzle. That point is: Just because something is phrased a certain way is not reason to assume that that phrasing is the best way to represent the problem. And one way to critically examine the situation is to reframe it in a mathematical equation. Khaled said, “Interesting how, once you assume that you can implicitly trust a given source, you can be led through any logic, or illogic, and have a lot of trouble pulling yourself back to a critical mindset.” How true. Then Mark gave a good method to understand how to see where the paradox lies when he said, “I started to write an equation, because properly written equations can solve all counting problems, but then realized that this was pointless, because adding 2 dollars to the 27 dollars the guests paid did not reflect what happened.” Exactly! The question was phrased to lead you to believe that because the facts were a certain way (which it accurately represented) you had to see it in a certain way (which was anything but accurate). Continue reading Math Puzzle – Case of the Missing Dollar(?) Part 2 (The Flip Side) →
Original Photo by Norsehorse Edited by Brian There’s a braintwister that’s been going around the internet, well, probably ever since there was an internet. It’s actually probably thousands of years old in one version or another. You may have seen it phrased like this: Three men go into a motel. The man behind the desk said that [...] This post is concerned with a very interesting problem, called “The Traveler’s Dilemma.” There is a very good article about it, written by it’s creator, Professor Kaushik Basu, in the June, 2007 issue of the Scientific American. The article begins: “When playing this simple game, people consistently reject the rational choice. In fact, by acting illogically, they end up reaping a larger reward–an outcome that demands a new kind of formal reasoning.” Since gold coins (if they are gold coins, and not some hybrid – and the question did say “gold coins”) are valued by their weight, it stands to reason that a $5 gold coin is worth half of a $10 gold coin. [...] |
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