2 cars approach each other, with20 km between them. The speed ofeach car is10 kmph. At 20 km apart fromeach, a fly starts traveling from one car towards another at 15 kmph. Once it reaches the other car, it turns back and starts towards the first car. It continues todo this until the cars meet/collide. How much distance does the fly cover in total?
is it just 15km? The cars meet after an hour and the fly is going 15kmph for 1h, so all the bouncing back and forth is irrelevant. Feels like a trick question and I’m missing something though
Totally. There’s a funny story about this question going around the Princeton Advanced Studies center. Some would see the trick, but many would get stuck on trying to add up each portion of the journey.
And then they took the question to von Neumann. It begins to consider it and our come 15 km. They’re elated and say, you must have gotten the trick. “What trick? All I did was add up the geometric sum.” And a couple of insanely smart people left dumbfounded at how smart von Neumann was.
This one question breaks American brains.
2 cars approach each other, with 20 km between them. The speed of each car is 10 kmph. At 20 km apart from each, a fly starts traveling from one car towards another at 15 kmph. Once it reaches the other car, it turns back and starts towards the first car. It continues to do this until the cars meet/collide. How much distance does the fly cover in total?/s
is it just 15km? The cars meet after an hour and the fly is going 15kmph for 1h, so all the bouncing back and forth is irrelevant. Feels like a trick question and I’m missing something though
Totally. There’s a funny story about this question going around the Princeton Advanced Studies center. Some would see the trick, but many would get stuck on trying to add up each portion of the journey.
And then they took the question to von Neumann. It begins to consider it and our come 15 km. They’re elated and say, you must have gotten the trick. “What trick? All I did was add up the geometric sum.” And a couple of insanely smart people left dumbfounded at how smart von Neumann was.
Of course, he could have been pulling their leg.