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The "nine dots" puzzle. The puzzle asks to link all nine dots using four straight lines or fewer, without lifting the pen. The nine dots puzzle is a mathematical puzzle whose task is to connect nine squarely arranged points with a pen by four (or fewer) straight lines without lifting the pen or retracing any lines.
The Wason selection task (or four-card problem) is a logic puzzle devised by Peter Cathcart Wason in 1966. [1] [2] [3] It is one of the most famous tasks in the study of deductive reasoning. [4] An example of the puzzle is: You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table, each of which has a number on one side and a color on the other.
This approach can be seen as one of the two basic approaches to problem-solving, contrasted with an approach using insight and theory. However, there are intermediate methods that, for example, use theory to guide the method, an approach known as guided empiricism. [citation needed]
For instance, a meeting may be called to review a particular problem and to develop a solution for the problem. The Six Thinking Hats method could then be used in a sequence to first explore the problem, then develop a set of solutions, and to finally choose a solution through critical examination of the solution set.
The former is an example of simple problem solving (SPS) addressing one issue, whereas the latter is complex problem solving (CPS) with multiple interrelated obstacles. [1] Another classification of problem-solving tasks is into well-defined problems with specific obstacles and goals, and ill-defined problems in which the current situation is ...
It concerns sequences of integers in which each term is obtained from the previous term as follows: if a term is even, the next term is one half of it. If a term is odd, the next term is 3 times the previous term plus 1. The conjecture is that these sequences always reach 1, no matter which positive integer is chosen to start the sequence.
In addition to posing a rather challenging mathematical game, the busy beaver functions Σ(n) and S(n) offer an entirely new approach to solving pure mathematics problems. Many open problems in mathematics could in theory, but not in practice, be solved in a systematic way given the value of S ( n ) for a sufficiently large n .
One strategy for solving this version of the hat problem employs Hamming codes, which are commonly used to detect and correct errors in data transmission. The probability for winning will be much higher than 50%, depending on the number of players in the puzzle configuration: for example, a winning probability of 87.5% for 7 players.