https://zeta.one/viral-math/

I wrote a (very long) blog post about those viral math problems and am looking for feedback, especially from people who are not convinced that the problem is ambiguous.

It’s about a 30min read so thank you in advance if you really take the time to read it, but I think it’s worth it if you joined such discussions in the past, but I’m probably biased because I wrote it :)

  • 🐠 tiago🍍@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Damn ragebait posts, it’s always the same recycled operation. They could at least spice it up, like the discussion about absolute value. What’s |a|b|c|?

    What I gather from this, is that Geogebra is superior for not allowing ambiguous notation to be parsed 👌

    • What’s |a|b|c|?

      The absolute value of a, times b, times the absolute value of c (which would be more naturally written as b|ac|). Unlike brackets, there’s no such thing as nested absolute value. If you wanted it to read as the absolute value of (a times the absolute value of b times c), then that’s EXACTLY the same answer as the absolute value of (a times b times c), which is why nested absolute values make no sense - you only have to take absolute value once to get rid of all the contained signs.

    • wischi@programming.devOP
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      1 year ago

      Your example with the absolute values is actually linked in the “Even more ambiguous math notations” section.

      Geogebra has indeed found a good solution but it only works if you input field supports fractions and a lot of calculators (even CAS like WolframAlpha) don’t support that.

      • Even more ambiguous math notations

        Except that isn’t ambiguous either. See my reply to the original comment.

        Geogebra has indeed found a good solution

        Geogebra has done the same thing as Desmos, which is wrong. Desmos USED TO give correct answers, but then they changed it to automatically interpret / as a fraction, which is good, except when they did that it ALSO now interprets ÷ as a fraction, which is wrong. ½ is 1 term, 1÷2 is 2 terms (but Desmos now treats it as 1 term, which goes against the definition of terms)