Quote:
Originally Posted by MoodyBlues
But, as I see it, there is no ambiguity. There's only PERCEIVED ambiguity by people who don't understand how math problems are supposed to be solved!  |
What's the effective difference between ambiguity and perceived ambiguity? Either way, people are needlessly confused.
I took one look at this expression and knew that the correct answer was 9, but I also saw how it was intentionally written to be tricky. That's why I posted the XKCD comic on the previous page. People complain that math is obtuse. I think those people are wrong (I have a computer science degree with a math minor), but things like this certainly don't help our cause.
One extra set of parentheses around the 6/2 eliminates most of the ambiguity displayed here (even though the ambiguity results from a flawed understanding of the order of operations) at the cost of being a little bit redundant. I think that's a reasonable trade.