Oops. Thanks, fixed it.
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A bog standard grade school word problem. The kind that make kids hate math.
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i can’t tell you the number of times i ran into this as a kid, or wanted to ask a question that a teacher didn’t have an answer to.
in one class, i solved a problem in a way that i was first told i was wrong, and then after showing my solution was told i must have cheated ( because there was no way i could have thought that answer up myself. )
i had lots of good teachers ( thank goodness ) - but now and again it wouldn’t hurt for adults to say: i don’t know, or i was wrong, or heck: good job – even if it wasn’t the answer they wanted to hear.
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“The teacher made it clear to her class that the objective of the assignment was not to find a solution to the problem, but to find the solution she knew…”
Exactly! My manager just loves doing this. “So what’s the first thing you think of?” “Uh… staring like a deer in the headlights?”
@SBarsinister Ah, but you neglected to account for General Relativity! Now then, how much is 500 miles per minute divided by c?
I am a puzzle right now. (One I am desperate to solve!)
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Stop suppressing my creativity! HELP HELP, I’m being suppressed! Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
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Reality is biased!
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I like the version about the lilly pad that doubles in size every day. (Apparently it was once a popular line for job interviews?)
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I’ve recently taken to asking the kiddo questions from the game Mindtrap - which are usually logic or riddle puzzles. It’s fun.
thats it - time works forwards and backwards, even tho were so used to one direction
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500 miles.
(I solved it using a pen on cardboard…)
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I’d say the puzzle is: In what way are they trying to trick me into following a useless train of thought? Once that’s answered, as you say it’s just an algebra problem with an extraneous piece of information. (We are basically saying the same thing.)
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In a refractive material or in a vacuum?
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There was a time when I would have tried to figure the puzzle out. I must be getting old. I just read the comments until there was a consensus on the correct answer, and then went and found this video:
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My art teacher once asked us to draw a “sign of spring.”
I did this:
I got an ‘A’ but personally I don’t think I deserved it.
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(sputter) …I don’t know… Aaaaaa! (Flies off the bridge, into the chasm.)
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You’re not old. You’re old if you thought of this:
(I’m not quite that old. My oldest sibling had the LP.)
(This one is actually more haunting, but has less info in the accompanying text.)
btw I hadn’t seen the Proclaimers video–I liked it–thanks for posting it.
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Adding another thought, tangentially related to puzzles—At first I had written “I hadn’t seen or heard the Proclaimers song”, because when I watched the video both the song and the video seemed new to me. But I changed it to “I hadn’t seen the Proclaimers video” because when I played it a second time to just listen to it, I realized that I was familiar with the song from the past. But when I had watched the video, which was new to me, the song seemed new too. So I guess the new-to-me video was like the extraneous information in the puzzle, that sidetracks you into thinking that you don’t know what you do in fact know. Or something like that.
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I have always liked that puzzle, being 1) something that could actually happen, unlike so many puzzles, and 2) a nice example of something we usually think of as having two states (on and off) actually having a third (off, but warm). I did always constrain the problem to working alone and using incandescent bulbs, because too much ambiguity can be frustrating. And I dislike intensely puzzles that require knowing the assumptions of the writer. But more than the pat solution, I liked the discussion the puzzle fostered, talking about different crazy ways to solve the problem.
I wonder when people will no longer remember incandescent bulbs even existed?
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I think the whole point of the Missile Puzzle is to recognise how to filter out unnecessary details. As others have pointed out, the distance at the start is not relevant to what was asked, but presented as if it were an Important Clue™.
And that is actually a good skill to learn, especially when dealing with development teams. Nearly half of my job is filtering the information about what is requested to find out what the stakeholder really wants, not what they say they want.
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