Poll: 6÷2(1+2)

6/2(1+2) = ?

  • 9

    Votes: 516 68.9%

  • 1

    Votes: 233 31.1%
  • Total voters
    749
Nitefly said:
I'm not really sure if you are reading what we have written :p

If you go left to right in GCSE fashion, then yes, the answer is clearly 9.

But it can be constructed as this as nobody post GCSE ever uses the divide sign and it can be done so fairly:


I don't really have anything else to add for this conversation, but I would add that your attitude totally stinks in terms of getting people round to your view. No one that disagrees with you has been claiming anything as a matter of fact, just as a discussion and how they have viewed it. Many people of equal qualification are coming up with different answers, that's all there is to it. If you want to conclude it's 9, then fine.

So I'll go and work on my admittedly poor mathematics and you can go and work on your poor communication and people skills - we'll call it even stevens :p
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Why are you willfully choosing to be this arrogant? :mad:

If you just thought about it for ten seconds rather than the nine or less you're taking now, you would realise that we are never wrong. :rolleyes:

;)
 
BODMAS shouldn't be an issue here. Since the group of real numbers associatied with multiplication is associative and commutative, the order in which you do the multiplication or division doesn't matter. BODMAS isn't the problem.

The problem is notation. If you wrote:

x = 6/2(1+2) on a piece of paper in a maths exam nobody would know what you're on about. They'd guess at either 9 or 1, depending on how their brain decides to process your poor use of notation.

Your "bar" for division should be level with the equal sign. Anything above it is to be multiplied, anything below is your 'division' (or multiplication by the reciprocal). Since in computers we often don't have the luxury of having two 'lines' one above the other, we settle for "/" as our symbol for division, and hope that whoever we're talking to will decipher what we're saying correctly. I'm no computer scientist but I suppose it would be much better practice in this case to write our equation as either:

x = 6/(2(1+2)), which would equal 1, or
x = 6(1+2)/2, which would equal 9.

Here the brackets don't signify what should be done first, but rather clearly tells the reader whether he's supposed to be multiplying by (1+2), or by 1/(1+2). This is something obvious when written on a piece of paper, but less so on a computer.

Quick Edit: The poll needs another option - the equation is poorly written and whoever wrote it did not write an interesting problem, they deliberately misled people for the fun of it.
 
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therandom said:
The equation would be evaluated differently depending on the language you were using. Hence its ambiguity from a Computer Science perspective.
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Fair point - if we're talking about programming specifically then there is nothing preventing someone from implementing an operator in a particular way when constructing a language - I'd be interested if you could give an example of one though?
 
dowie said:
Fair point - if we're talking about programming specifically then there is nothing preventing someone from implementing an operator in a particular way when constructing a language - I'd be interested if you could give an example of one though?
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Again, there isn't ambiguity in a computer science perspective. When making a calculator, the programmer can either require the user to make explicit the order of operations using brackets (a dumb calculator parser - like in low end scientific calculators, for example) or they can program in a more intelligent calculator that does it correctly.
 
How about we grab any mathematics book above GCSE level and the sharp end of a pineapple and go and 'educate' Hatter? :)

'People skills' indeed. :D
 
guyfawkes5 said:
How about we grab any mathematics book above GCSE level and the sharp end of a pineapple and go and 'educate' Hatter? :)
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Just because you were taught incorrectly and your teachers did not explain the caveats does not require me to pander to your wilful ignorance.

You were also taught that for the purposes of modelling, current flows forward through an electric circuit. Are you going to 'educate' me that this is physically correct, just because you never took physics further or your teachers were crap?
 
Hatter The Mad said:
Just because you were taught incorrectly and your teachers did not explain the caveats does not require me to pander to your wilful ignorance.

You were also taught that for the purposes of modelling, current flows forward through an electric circuit. Are you going to 'educate' me that this is physically correct, just because you never took physics further or your teachers were crap?
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For the upteenth time, the people disagreeing with you were taught the same thing but don't think of it as the all-encompassing God-given 'rule' that you do.

Once you start replying to that we might be getting somewhere, although I do suspect at this point only voltage-therapy may be able to persuade your kind self that you might not be completely 100% right as always.
 
bingmath.png


excelmath.png


googlemath.png


Can't be bothered to take a picture of my scientific calculator but that shows 9 too.

Is this considered proof or are google/excel/Bing/wolfram alpha/casio all wrong?
 
Hatter The Mad said:
Even if you parse the 'improperly written' version (ie with the division symbol) properly (the standard order of operations), you get the right answer: 9

This is the stupidity of the whole thing. It is insane.
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I think it should be 9 too, but I'll say this again.

Because the problem doesn't clearly show whether we should be multiplying by (1+2) or its reciprocal, you can't say which answer is right. The problem is poorly written and it has nothing to do with the "order" of operations, since as I've said - the real numbers are associative and commutative with respect to ordinary multiplication.
 
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