Re: SQL Fun Challenge #2

"Noons" <wizofoz2k_at_yahoo.com.au> wrote in message news:<40485d92$0$3953$afc38c87_at_news.optusnet.com.au>...
> "Joel Garry" <joel-garry_at_home.com> wrote in message
> news:91884734.0403041514.54cef120_at_posting.google.com...
>
>
> > I'm having trouble understanding why there can't be triplets. It's
> > not like they all come out at the exact same time (imagine her waxing
> > onomatopoetically if they did!), one is eldest.
>
>
> Oh, triplets are perfectly possible. But you'll find it
> really hard to age them in years so the product of
> their ages is 36.
> ;)

Ah, you've stepped in the trap. Remember, we are talking about Mathematicians here. And, judging from their names, Russian Mathematicians.

So, presumably they are familiar with concepts such as statistics, probability, variance, rounding, standard deviation, The Arrow of Time, date arithmetic, step functions, sawtooth graphs, chess algorithms, Things Beyond Positive Integers, and so forth.

So the most obvious mistaken inference from the OP is that age is in integral years. Last night I asked my older boy how old he was (his birthday is in a month) - "seven-and-a-half" is the immediate response from the, uh, 7 year old. So does this mean mathematicians unlearn fractions as they learn math?

Which leads to the answer, cube root of 36, or about 3.3, or a bit less than 3 years, 4 months. (Too bad it didn't come out to 4 years, 3 months, then we could make 19100 jokes, too). Not an unreasonable age for the triplets. Only unreasonable if you are a computer geek rather than a mathematician, and you place an incorrect reliance on too many decimal places because you forgot all that stuff about appropriate rounding. Ask a parent how old their kid is who was born last Christmas.

Next is the windows. They are more arguably going to be integral, so you maybe have to deal with converting non-integral values to integral. 3.3 + 3.3 + 3.3 is roundable to ten, as is 3 times the cube root of 36. Or you could subtract out a tenth of a window where someone broke it out to get to the casement handle.

Now to deal with Occam. Hey, these are _Russians_, they don't know from Occam. The one guy probably knows the other guy is familiar with his forty page proof of some obscure piece of number theory, including references to his unpublished proofs of several famous unproved theorems. Plus, they probably play chess and have had to deal with several governments, so both know any devious or roundabout answer is going to be more likely correct. And if they are Russian Jewish, add about 600 pages of commentary to all that.

So I still don't understand why they can't be triplets.

Expressing this in SQL left as an exercise for the student. But it does go to show that driving the answer to a problem through coding limitations can be a big mistake.

jg

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