Mind bogglers are problems in which solutions are simple and straightforward, but for some reason or other run counter to human intuition.
Today I present to you with two classic mind bogglers. Let’s see what we can learn from them.
The first one is a classic and I’m sure many of you actually know it:
Three travelers go into a hotel and are charged $30 for a room. They each contribute $10. That evening the hotel manager realizes that the men were overcharged. They should have got a group discount and paid $25. So he sends a bellhop up to the room to return $5. The three travelers however cannot equally split the $5, so they give the bellhop $2 as a tip and keep $3 which they split among themselves - $1 each.
Now each traveler has paid $9, for a total of $27. The bellhop has2$. So $29 is accounted for.
Where has the 30th dollar gone?
Continue reading ‘How do you put a giraffe in a refrigerator?’
Posted in Problem Solving categories |
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Many people would say that a problem is “a gap between a desired situation and the existing one”.
I don’t agree with this definition.
We would like life expectancy to be around 150 years (and come to think of it, why not even older?) The fact is that it currently isn’t 150 years, and yet we don’t really (at least not directly) label it as a problem.
So a better (and still not complete) definition of a problem would be, “a gap between a desired situation and an existing one that we have reason to believe we can eliminate”.
This is interesting: some people would regard a certain situation as a problem because they believe there may be a solution, while others wouldn’t see any problem because they can’t even envision a way to a solution.
Continue reading ‘What’s a problem?’
Posted in Problem Solving categories |
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Think for a minute what is it about the car that allows you to drive fast.
Is it the engine? The tires? The gas tank? Well, yeh. All of the above. But most importantly – it is the breaks. It is the fact that you can stop – that you can effectively reduce your speed – that creates the conditions which allow you to accelerate in the first place.
Continue reading ‘Brakes, GPS and the feasibility filter’
Posted in Ideation categories |
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