Science Memes

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submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I'm a spatial-visual person, so when presented with this problem as a teenager, I instead solved it spatially. If you stack squares like.

█.
██.
███.
...

To the hundredth row, you get a shape that is a half filled square that is 100x100. Except the diagonal is fully filled in, so you need to add another 50.

So the answer was 0.5x100x100 + 0.5x100. Easy to visualize, easy to solve. 5050.

There's a similar problem in sports -- I was a teaching assistant for our rural school's gym class so this one also popped up for me as a teenager. If you have 100 teams and each team needs to play each other team once... You fill in a similar grid, with the teams on both the x and y axis. The diagonal gets removed in this scenario because a team cannot play itself. So the answer is 0.5x100x100 - 0.5x100. 4950. Anyone who has ever tried to plan any sort of tournament can probably solve this intuitively, but 25 years ago I though I was the smartest gym class teaching assistant ever ;)