A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving

Re:A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving by SiVal on Thursday July 02, 2015 @04:34PM (#9821434)

I actually avoided going that far to avoid getting bad data. I was trying to answer the question, "What does the experimenter THINK his rule is?" rather than what will the computer do. Since the computer can't be infinite, it will inevitably fail with overflow, underflow, and such.

I was relieved, in fact, when it worked with negatives and floats in a "safe" range.

I also tested with 1,1,2 and 1,2,2 to make sure that the required increase applied to ALL of the values, not just a specific pair.

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Re:A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving by mjevans on Thursday July 02, 2015 @05:56PM (#9821977)

I too tried to test if it was only one pair that was significant. However I grew impatient and didn't try to come up with more tests when I thought I had a sufficient answer to explain my most vexing observation (negative, positive, positive out of combinations involving negative numbers).

The observation to brainstorm for ways of proving that a statement is in fact wrong, and exhausting them, is such an eloquent way of wording the hunt for a negative.

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