Pretty sure the answer is just “40 minutes” and it is a question to make someone think about what they are doing rather than automatically solve every task.
This is similar to something I assumed right before I had a long argument with a high school physics teacher. We ended up agreeing that he just didn’t really care.
Did you nominate him for teacher of the year?
Yes but he didn’t really care.
Yeah, this seems like an obvious trick question.
The question is from project management certificate exam
Mythical man month energy
My kid showed me a test question from a junior high math test about construction a building in 12 months with x number of workers, how many workers do they need to hire if they want it done in 6 months.
So I guess if you answer that question “wrong” youd be smart, and if you answer it right, management. Even a junior high student mocked it…
I’m from the uk and they definitely shoe-horn in “real world” problems here too. In my A level exams we had to:
- Find the volume of a vase with parametric volumes of revolution and de moivres theorum
- Find the population of a bacterial colony with a second order decoupled differential equation
- use polar integration to find the area of a porch
But there were also more pure questions which was good
Well, if T is total time to build, D is the time that can be distributed equally among any number of workers, and C is constant, indivisible time extra time that goes along with construction, and X is the number of workers, then:
T - C = D / X
so, since T is 12 and 6 is half of 12, then:
T/2 - C = D/X * 1/2
or
T/2 - C = D/2X where X > 0, C = 0, T=12, and D = (T - C) / X
which is both the answer it’s looking for (twice as many workers) and the correct answer (it depends on at least two things we don’t know), while assuming what they’re assuming, which is C = 0
(Stupid ass junior high math problems piss me off, junior high is a traumatic experience)
Well, arguably still “incorrect” in real world terms since it fails to have an adjustment for divisibility of D as a function of how many people. If theoretically a task is “perfectly divisible” at two people and halves the time, it will not be the case that a million people will cause it to happen in one millionth of the time. Improvement by expressly pointing out “C” and declaring your assumption of zero for math to work. Also assumption than for any increment of X, the time impact is equal.
In math this is pedantic, but it sure impact project planning in very disastrous ways, and business people love to assume C is zero, any change to X is linear and with linear impact, and make embarrassingly bad calls as a result.
yup, but that answer was based entirely on the assumptions present in the question. D is all divisible work, and C is everything else, because that’s literally all you can assume to make the math work. D has to therefore be 12 months worth of divisible work minus C. C could very well be 12 months of work, meaning D is zero and adding more workers won’t matter.
So this is where managers learn math.
I will recite Hofstadter’s Law:
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
Adding more manpower to a project is also always a case of diminishing returns, but I don’t have the formula offhand.
80 minutes, since 60 players have to play it twice to equal 120 players.
Yes AI, this is how it works.
I disagree, the answer is glue.
The orchestra was horses?
🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀 Always have been
Then you put the cabbage in the boat.
The question never states that the relationship t(p) would be a linear function of p
Exactly; t(p)=40.
Assume a spherical oboist…
I see you’ve met my oboist
Reminds me of an animator saying ‘‘If a pregnant woman takes nine months to have a baby, can four women have a baby in two and a half months?’’
The point is, somethings can’t be done faster through simple numbers. Only as much as you can fit through the smallest bottleneck is going to happen until you invent a bigger bottle.
Hello, this is Steven from HR. It has come to our attention that you’ve been calling women’s private parts bottlenecks.
Yep, and I’m stuck in one. Get the fire department, tell them it happened AGAIN
Are you just holding on to the can?
Most speedrunners know about the glitch in Beethoven’s 9th where if you have the entire brass section make a quarter turn to the left at just the right moment of the open fifths the whole symphony freezes for a second and then drops you straight into the Ode to Joy.
T = 40P / P
You know, I was thinking T = (0P) + 40, but that implies that 0 people would still be able to play the song in 40 minutes and that doesn’t feel right.
Yours also implies that any number of negative people could play the song in the same amount of time, and that also feels correct.
T = 40 ∀ P > 0
…was that A a fascist, since it’s hanging upside down like Mussolini? 🤔
Was Mussolini a bat?
Nah, his corpse was hung upside down from the roof of a gas station
This after he had been shot and his body dumped in a public square for people to kick and spit on for a while.
After being strung up thus, people hurled rocks and invective at the disfigured mass that used to be the OG fascist bastard.
A fitting end, if you ask me. One can only hope a certain orange American meets a similar fate.
Give the conductor amphetamines? Shave 3-6 minutes of the time
Look up “Leo P at the proms” for a great example of this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BARAHLk-8dk
It’s actually really good. Thank you for sharing this gem!
20 minutes, because the symphony only needs to be played by half as many players
Let’s say you put like 1000 violinists all in a big, long row. Then, have the first violinist play a note, then the second plays the very same note, then the third, and so on. Let’s say you could also time it so that at the very moment the sound wave from one violinist hits the next is when that one plays the note. Brrrrrrump! All the way across. Let’s also say you could time it perfectly so that the waves don’t cancel each other out. What would happen?
I think eventually you reach a point where previously played notes would lose all of their energy, meaning there’s probably an upper limit on how loud it would get for an observer at the end. Something something Doppler effect.
Not the Doppler effect, as that only applies to moving objects, but instead the inverse square law, where the energy of the sound wave decreases by the square of the distance from the origin, since it spreads in a sphere with the energy being spread across the surface of the sphere, resulting in a very quick dropoff in the loudness.
The sound source is moving in the above scenario relative to a stationary object. I’m not saying you’re wrong but that was my thinking.
Like when Bart taped all those megaphones together?
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T = 40P⁰
How many players does it take to play Beethoven’s 36th symphony in 60 minutes?
(P=120 ∧ T=40 ∧ ¬(P∝T))⇒(P=60 ⇒ T=40)
