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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> It probably is indeed a big problem that some people seem incapable of
> seeing the big picture, the generic rules behind the specific examples,
Then there's the other extreme of people, who are really good at it.
Like that mathematician (I forget his name, but one of the famous ones)
who was in grade school and the teacher told the students to sum all the
numbers from 1 to 100, to keep them busy for at least half an hour, and
practice summation. This guy gives the correct in far less than a minute,
and the teacher is amazed.
I suppose the kid's reasoning was something like: "Hmm, actually if I
take the *average* of all the numbers, and multiply it by the amount of
numbers, I should get the correct result, because summing the average
100 times should be the same as summing all the original 100 numbers.
Now, what is the average of all the numbers between 1 and 100? It must
be (100+1)/2. Now multiply that by the amount of numbers, ie. 100, and
we have the answer."
Unfortunately not many people have that kind of deduction power at
that age (or at any age).
--
- Warp
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