Can you solve this riddle Elon Musk asks job applicants?

I’m battling the thing.

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Good point. I guess mine only works if you face that direction, walk a mile and repeat two more times.

If you do that, then there are no solutions. Even at the north pole, if you face south, walk straight for a mile, face west, walk straight for a mile, then face north and walk straight for a mile, you’ll be about a mile from where you started.

“walking west” continuously requires that you walk along a circular arc* (anywhere except on the Equator).

*technically so does walking north/south, but in those cases the circle is always a great circle passing through the poles, and if we approximate the local surface as a plane, it appears to be a straight line.

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It’s red – but darkening quickly as my throat has been slashed and my face splashed with blood and sinew…

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Under water, because there’s no land at the North Pole. :grin:

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But they are just regular spheres…

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Dontcha mean othonormal?

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it ends with a moderately clever extension of the usual polar answer. The solutions kind of remind me of horocycles, from hyperbolic geometry. I think it might be a complete classification, although I haven’t written down a proof.

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I’d say regular both as “usual” and as the homogeneous space SU(2)/U(1) !

Edit: I totally forgot, but the orbits of that action are my avatar.

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That’s a Lie! :grin:

#WhyILoveMathematicians

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Standing on tip of s/t the shape of a 3-sided pyramid

:joy: This one actually made me laugh.

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Well the answer depends on who exactly is on the trolly of course

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Since pedants are running amok, time to point out that the real answer is somewhere in space, far from Earth. As for how you managed to walk there, ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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Plus, South isn’t down.

This question is one whose answer is known to people who read books full of brain teasers as a hobby, like my preteen self. What it has to do with job performance is beyond me.

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You forgot “… in simple harmonic motion.”

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Methinks some people here were rejected for jobs at a Musk-owned company, haha!

FTA:

“He adds, ‘[Musk] tends to care less about whether or not the person gets the answer than about how they describe the problem and their approach to solving it.’”

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If it is a mensa membership test then it is the later