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 :)
Hi, expert here, calculators have nothing to do with it. There’s an agreed upon “Order of Operations” that we teach to kids, and there’s a mutual agreement that it’s only approximately correct. Calculators have to pick an explicit parsing algorithm, humans don’t have to and so they don’t. I don’t look to a dictionary to tell me what I mean when I speak to another human.
Thanks for putting my thoughts into words, that’s exactly why I hate math. It was supposed to be the logical one, but since it only needs to be parsed by humans it failed at even that. It’s just conventions upon conventions to the point where it’s notably different from one teacher/professor to the next.
I guess you can tell why I went into comp-sci (and also why I’m struggling there too)