The space pen affair is a well known urban myth, see for example <a href="http://io9.com/5838635/the-million-dollar-space-pen-hoax" rel="nofollow">http://io9.com/5838635/the-million-dollar-space-pen-hoax</a><p>The second example is funny but it is a classic example of misdirection. It is made out to be about mathematics but has got nothing to with it. How exactly is that about overthinking something?<p>The third example is a ingenious solution by the author himself, a solution that is the product of thinking hard about coming up with a simple solution - hardly a case of whatever the opposite of overthinking is. If anything it is the opposite - just slice it up into 12 bites and take a small piece each of the last bit. If it's a mathematical question a mathematical approach seems more than reasonable.<p>All these examples seem to me to be weak examples of overthinking.<p>Here is a much better example of overthinking in my opinion, The Centipede's Dilemma:<p><i>A centipede was happy – quite!<p>Until a toad in fun<p>Said, "Pray, which leg moves after which?"<p>This raised her doubts to such a pitch,<p>She fell exhausted in the ditch<p>Not knowing how to run.</i><p>From <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipedes_dilemma" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipedes_dilemma</a>
It's not overthinking, it's called context.<p>If you give an engineering problem to an engineer in a corporate environment, he will try to do what he's been told to be a good job: good precision and low cost, complexity not being a problem as far as the solution is achieved. If he's given 1 hour, then using 59 minutes is just as valid as using 5. And rightly so.<p>As for the numeric problem, same thing. You are not giving a measure of "goodness" and you are not providing rules. I'd go ahead and fill in 2581 = fuck_you , where fuck_you is a constant defined as 3.15. That's a point-wise defined polynomial there. Voila, solved in 3 seconds. Just as valid as making up something as arbitrary as counting loops in a given numeric representation. Also, I'd bet the house I don't own that if I give that in a paper to a kid with no instructions he wouldn't come up with that "solution" - ever.<p>In the (urban legend) problem about the pen and pencil in zero-gravity, there is context. The objective is to take notes. It's a real world problem with a fixed solution, so yeah, just using a pencil would be a much better solution than engineering a special ballpen. An engineer can and should be expected to solve that. Engineers are expected to solve real world problems and consider real world situations and realistic expectations.
Even in the movie 3 Idiots, at the end of the movie, the man with the pen points out that there's a reason for the complexity: bits of graphite flying around in zero gravity near instrument panels and people's eyes, etc.<p>Simplicity is great, but sometimes complexity is warranted. More importantly, assuming other smart people (<i>many</i> other smart people) are wrong without deep thought is not a good idea.
>> Conjuring complex mathematical equations may make you look smart but to become truly creative you need to be able to liberate your mind from the the shell of knowledge, education and adultification you have accumulated. Only then can you think like a child again.<p>This claims that creativity and education are diametral opposites. This essentially replicates the myth of the natural artist who can only achieve true creativity within nature and by forgetting culture. The basis for both assumptions is a fundamental divide between culture and nature, whereas culture is seen as hindering the creativity and freedom of the <i>homo naturalis</i>.<p>While I'm sure you can always find <i>some</i> cases where this distinction might hold true, there are plenty of others that reveal the false dichotomy at work here.<p>There is a difference between a solution perceived as complicated or simple, but there is no objective measurement for a difference in <i>creativity</i>. The combination and application of maths (in the example with the pizza cutter) is as much a creative use of ideas as is the "manual" method with the string.
I hate to say this, but the article is complete bullcrap. Have you even seen the movie he references ? The protagonist is supposed to be this "naturally talented genius" who detests the bookish Indian academic education system, so throughout the film he takes potshots at the stuff he's taught in school, ultimately choosing to drop out without a degree until the Dean formally requests him to take the finals, upon which he gets the highest grade in the university. Its a completely one-sided portrayal, and while it is valid in the sense that Indian education system is wholly bunk, it is unfair to draw any deep profound lessons out of a shallow screenplay played for laughts. The pencil thing as has been pointed out by the commentators below is an urban legend.<p>The most talkedabout scene in the whole film involves a vaginal delivery using a vacuum blower as a suction device, and a AA battery as an inverter as the OB barks out instructions on a webcam. As a former electrical engineer I refuse to even entertain the possibility of such a stunt. Yet everybody in the media - the newspapers/TV/talkshows went gaga over this scene, suposedly a parable for "necessity is the mother(pun intended) of invention".<p>There's 2 scenes where the conductivity of brine is demonstrated when a person urinating on a live wire gets electrocuted, again played for laughs.<p>There's a scene where a student in his final year is unable to graduate because his thesis involves getting a toy helicopter to fly. He's unable to figure out the propulsion mechanics, so in disgust he throws the helicopter into the trash. The hero, our natural genius sophomore, picks up this helicopter, spends the time rigging up wires in the EE lab & finally gets it to fly. He puts a camera on the copter & as it coasts high in the air, it captures the video of the senior who has committed suicide by hanging in his dorm! Now is that crass or what ? Commiting suicide for failing to figure out some stupid propulsion mechanics! I remember thinking at the time that if this same film had been made in English, the critics & audience in the US would have torn it to shreds for such pandering & crass footage. But India being what it is, this very scene was lauded for its authenticity!<p>Even setting aside all that, the wrapping a string around your palm 11 times is simply trading off precision for some trial & error , not sme clever solution. For the preschool numbers thing, he's making up the rules as he goes along.<p>Frankly, the article should be titled "Not thinking".
I solved the second one in a couple minutes in my head with value substitutions. Unless you were to do with with a pen and paper, it'd be pretty difficult to pick up on the closed loops.<p>Generating the following list took less than 30 secs when I looked it over, so obviously the example of it taking a long time to solve is a bit contrived. What threw me off a bit at first was that the number 4 was not used at all. I spent a little time trying to figure out why that was excluded before moving on.<p>0 = 1
1 = 0
2 = 0
3 = 0
5 = 0
6 = 1
7 = 0
8 = 2
9 = 1
I'm surprised by how defensive the comments are here. They seem out of place, especially on "Hacker" News, an entity whose name by definition emphasizes thinking outside of the box. Frankly the post seems spot on regarding providing multiple examples (1 hypothetical and humorous, 1 general, and 1 specific) of how "engineering" minds' over thinking causes them to be outperformed by "simpler" minds and more obvious solutions. Even his string example could be kept obvious and simple by saying, "Measure the circumference, divide by 11, mark on string at regular intervals, cut to lines," and I'm fairly confident it would still be the best answer.<p>Any post-sophomoric software engineer will lament an over-designed system they helped create, lauded for its superior design, only to have it become unwieldy and unmanageable under its own monstrous complexity, and then refactored to a far simpler and more intuitive solution. It's no coincidence KISS is taught in every Engineering 101 class across the country.<p>I found the article to be light and refreshing, reminding me that as an engineer, often I am my own worst enemy...<p>Or the very least, the enemy of that tragic racquetball launcher I built in Freshman engineering that _literally_ crumpled under its own weight on demo day. Lol.
The numbers based question was hilarious!!, specially to know that pre-school children can solve it in 5 mins. Try to show this question to a pre-school child and let us know what happens.<p>Our brain is just a amazing pattern matching machine. As soon as it is presented with a problem it starts to find patterns/relations in the problem along with going through the knowledge base it has acquired till now and trying different permutations and combinations to find the solution. In the number question, as soon as you read it, the brain will try to find patterns "using" the mathematical knowledge it has and it will keep on doing so until it gets frustrated an says WTF there is no relation here but it may happen that few days later you subconscious do find a pattern here based on "shapes" and not "numbers" but that is very very unlikely because as soon as we see numbers we think in numbers and not their shapes. If this problem was presented using shapes, anybody could have solved it in seconds.
Well, my pizza solution would have been to find a measuring tape and divide the circumference by eleven with your phone calculator ;)<p>But is it our problem to over think everything. School, university, bureaucracy, everything we encounter in life pushes us into that direction.<p>Probably to stop us from getting killed. Something evolutionary...
The numbers puzzle was easy to spot if you've ever played Petals around the Rose.<p>Here's a classic article about that game, dating back to 1977, describing Bill Gates trying to figure it out:
<a href="http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm</a>
I'm in the "higher education" category, yet that puzzle only took me about 2-3min of looking at it... I got briefly red-herringed by digit sums / digital roots looking promising, so spent most of the time thinking about those, but, once I'd found counter-examples, it didn't take long to crack.<p>That said, the "pre-school children" bit was a big hint as to how to approach it.<p>The use of '=' instead of, say, '→' made the math pedant in me twitch, though ;)
Nobody really needs to divide a pizza into eleven pieces with such precision. It's presented as a "real" situation, but it's a classic type of mathematical problem, the constraints of which are entirely made up <i>for fun</i>. When he dismisses the geometrical solution as "overthinking" and a sign of a lack of creativity, he not only misses the point, he's mocking what other people do for fun. Nice.<p>Also, as someone else already pointed out, he didn't specify how to find the middle point of the pizza, so his answer isn't a complete practical solution anyway.
The solution is very clever. However, it is incomplete. In addition to the equally divided markings around the circumference, you also need to know the midpoint of the circle. Without the midpoint, the cuts may still yield unequal slices. Fortunately, using the author's same technique, you can easily produce the midpoint by making marks at the opposite ends of a single loop. Those two additional markings provide a guide for you to make cuts into the midpoint of the pizza.
>php abc.php<p><pre><code> Looking for 8+8+0+9 being 6 : found 2+2+1+1 : 6
Looking for 7+1+1+1 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
Looking for 2+1+7+2 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
Looking for 6+6+6+6 being 4 : found 1+1+1+1 : 4
Looking for 1+1+1+1 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
Looking for 3+2+1+3 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
Looking for 7+6+6+2 being 2 : found 0+1+1+0 : 2
Looking for 9+3+1+3 being 1 : found 1+0+0+0 : 1
Looking for 0+0+0+0 being 4 : found 1+1+1+1 : 4
Looking for 2+2+2+2 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
Looking for 3+3+3+3 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
Looking for 5+5+5+5 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
Looking for 8+1+9+3 being 3 : found 2+0+1+0 : 3
Looking for 8+0+9+6 being 5 : found 2+1+1+1 : 5
Looking for 1+0+1+2 being 1 : found 0+1+0+0 : 1
Looking for 7+7+7+7 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
Looking for 9+9+9+9 being 4 : found 1+1+1+1 : 4
Looking for 7+7+5+6 being 1 : found 0+0+0+1 : 1
Looking for 6+8+5+5 being 3 : found 1+2+0+0 : 3
Looking for 9+8+8+1 being 5 : found 1+2+2+0 : 5
Looking for 5+5+3+1 being 0 : found 0+0+0+0 : 0
Looking for 2+5+8+1 being 2 : found 0+0+2+0 : 2
</code></pre>
:D
Who cares about pens and pencils, use an ipad :)<p>Overthinking leads to over-enginnering, because humans aren't great at knowing what to do with all the free time we'd have if we did our job in 10% of the time :) Perhaps overthinking is required to keep us busy. Even though we all claim our time is money, in reality most get paid by the hour and not by the amount of work that has been accomplished. Plus complexity gives more weight to what we do, allowing us to claim that there's no shortcut to where we're going. That degree, that level of experience, are all job requirements that protect us.<p>Experienced entrepreneurs often fall for this trap. Too much prior knowledge of a particular industry leads them to quickly find faults in most ideas, and the just-do-it attitude that leads to simple approaches that stun everyone slowly fades.
I figured out the number one in about 30 seconds. The biggest clue is that it claims preschoolers get it easily. That means all mathematical operations, except addition and less likely subtraction, is out of the question. A quick glance showed that adding or subtracting in any simple way would not yield a result - a more complicated way would not be done by a preschooler. So that meant it probably was some sort of spacial or visual problem. Seeing 6666=4 and 0000=4 got me thinking about the shapes of the numbers, and from there I quickly determined the answer was the number of closed loops.
I believe that one reason why things can get overcomplicated is because often this has proven to be profitable. Why did it cost millions of dollars to create a pen in space when a pencil would do? Obviously, someone benefited greatly financially from the government contracts that were given to them for the purpose of creating a pen that would work in space- even when it wasn't truly necessary. Many believe the old saying that "money makes the world go round." Could this be the reason why else we have legally allowed for financial instruments such as derivatives which are so complex that the majority of the public does not even understand them? Is it profitable for someone to have something such as this be so complicated that the general public will fail to see their inherent danger? While overthink is dangerous for productivity, someone has also figured out that it is profitable- at least for them.
Uhm I guess it's about common sense and not being an engineer all the time!!<p>If someone would call a pizza place in reality saying they wanted 11 equal pieces, they would have answered that at most they could have the pizza cut in some slices! :D HA!
The film scene is one of the things that motivated me to write this. So I used it for some humor. Whether it is true is besides the point. Though an urban myth, it made me think about the subject.