Archive > The Amazing Race 15 Spoilers
TAR15 EP1506 " Do It for the Hood! Do It for the Suburbs" (Dubai)
River:
--- Quote from: georgiapeach on October 27, 2009, 05:06:21 PM ---Does the term "hating hat" mean anything to y'all?? :lol3:
--- End quote ---
What?
:funny:
Anyway, I thought this was a decent leg, especially for this season, loved the detour!
Slowhatch:
In this particular instance, it would have been easy without a calculator. As others have pointed out, just use Lazy Man's arithmetic:
* 935 is close to 1000. Putting that into a half-million gives you a start of 500 ounces
* 65 (the remainder) is close to 50, or 5% of 1000, which puts an additional 25 ounces on the scale Then just keep drilling down the remainder. The calculator would be useful for small price changes. As Boingo mentioned, the gold wasn't marked or stamped (probably "amazing" gold, just like the phony gold bricks from The Mole 5), so figuring the weight units would be--trial and error?
apskip:
Slowhatch,
The problem with your method is precision. You won't get it to multiple decimal places to the right(the example showed 3 places). Using standard paper and pencil arithmetic, I (pretty decent at arithmetic as well as mathematics in general) attempted to do this in less than 55 seconds (leaving 5 seconds to place the pieces on the scale). It took me 100 seconds and my result was 525.33 due to rounding error. The correct answer by calculator is 525.217. Your approximation method has no chance.
I would like you to pick another quite different 4-digit exchange rate, run a timed calculation with your approximation method and then compare it to the calculator result. I bet you cannot do it correctly in 55 seconds or less.
The way teams should have approached this problem once they discovered the "changes every minute" feature was to ask the store personnel to borrow a calculator. I think this is what Nate/Herb did but they weren't able to successfully come up with a right answer due to slow speed. It's not high math involved here but I hypothesize that none of these individuals except Maria and Tiffany has done any serious arithmetic in years.
TARAsia Fan:
--- Quote from: georgiapeach on October 27, 2009, 05:06:21 PM ---Does the term "hating hat" mean anything to y'all?? :lol3:
--- End quote ---
Put another word in front of hating and yes it does.
Chateau d If:
--- Quote from: apskip on October 27, 2009, 10:07:16 PM ---Slowhatch,
The problem with your method is precision. You won't get it to multiple decimal places to the right(the example showed 3 places). Using standard paper and pencil arithmetic, I (pretty decent at arithmetic as well as mathematics in general) attempted to do this in less than 55 seconds (leaving 5 seconds to place the pieces on the scale). It took me 100 seconds and my result was 525.33 due to rounding error. The correct answer by calculator is 525.217. Your approximation method has no chance.
I would like you to pick another quite different 4-digit exchange rate, run a timed calculation with your approximation method and then compare it to the calculator result. I bet you cannot do it correctly in 55 seconds or less.
The way teams should have approached this problem once they discovered the "changes every minute" feature was to ask the store personnel to borrow a calculator. I think this is what Nate/Herb did but they weren't able to successfully come up with a right answer due to slow speed. It's not high math involved here but I hypothesize that none of these individuals except Maria and Tiffany has done any serious arithmetic in years.
--- End quote ---
The difficulty of this task all depends on what accuracy the teams are required to use. At one point we hear Brian say that they have calculate it to the exact ounce. Okay, if that is the degree of accuracy then this is a piece of cake.
Watch and Learn !
Say the current price is $934.14 per ounce. Add 934.14 to 934.14 to get 1868.28. Add 934.14 to that to get 2802.42. And so on until you have 1 through ten covered like this:
1 934.14
2 1868.28
3 2802.42
4 3736.56
5 4670.70
6 5604.84
7 6538.98
8 7473.12
9 8407.26
10 9341.14
Without worrying about the price changing, just go ahead and determine that if it was still $934.14 then you would need
500 ounces plus 500000 - 467070 = 32390 worth (remainder), so add in
30 ounces plus 32390 - 28024.20 = 4905.80 worth (remainder), so add in
5 ounces plus 4905.80 - 4670.70 = 235.10 worth (remainder is less than one ounce) so skip it
So load up the scale with 535 ounces and wait for the next price change.
Say the next price change that pops up shows $942.75 per ounce. You have 60 seconds to do the following:
Get the difference between the two prices: 8.61
Multiply that by the number of ounces you have on the scale: 535 * 8.61 = 4606.35
That is how many dollars past $500000 your scale load is.
So, using the collection of already-multiplied amounts you can quickly estimate the number of ounces you need to remove from the scale:
5 ounces because 4606.35 is closer to 4670.70 than it is to 3736.56
Pull off the five ounces from the scale and call the judge.
There is an uncertainty in this method that may result in the wrong correction. That is because the 'old' price is being used to determine the amount to remove. But most of the time it works out correctly. If you think you can generate the table of multiplied numbers for the new current price then just do that from the start!
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