[QUOTE=chrisk]
Especially if they use a single ‘correct answer’ as the evaluation standard. Most puzzles (other than math) have more than one right answer, and even an answer that wouldn’t work out can show good things about somebody’s thinking style.
[/QUOTE]
I actually told the headhunter, “don’t you see the irony, that they call it a ‘creative thinking’ exercise, and they reject me since my equally logical answer wasn’t their pre-canned one?” He said his hands were tied. F#cking robots! :smack:
Twenty questions games have infinite solutions at the beginning, too; your goal is to come up with the one the asker is thinking of, not to come up with any old one. Otherwise, the game would be boring. (“I’m thinking of an animal.” “Is it a giraffe?” “No.” “Well, that’s a valid answer, too!”) These puzzles are analogous: your goal is to guess the answer the asker is thinking of, not just to find a correct answer. In turn, the asker should phrase the question such that the correct answer is extra-elegant and cool.
The radio question could be asked much better. Something like this:
[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
A man, feeling exuberant, turns on the radio in his car. He hears nothing that affects his mood. Turning it on depresses him to the point that he pulls over and shoots himself. Why?
[/QUOTE]
Now we only have 528,439,277 possible answers.
Good try but there is no way to save that “riddle”.
[QUOTE=Q.E.D.]
Don’t feel bad; you probably dodged a bullet anyway. Employers who use “lateral thinking” puzzles as pre-employment screening tools are universally idiots.
[/QUOTE]
All rules that are claimed to be universal are always wrong.
Twenty questions games have infinite solutions at the beginning, too; your goal is to come up with the one the asker is thinking of, not to come up with any old one. Otherwise, the game would be boring. (“I’m thinking of an animal.” “Is it a giraffe?” “No.” “Well, that’s a valid answer, too!”) These puzzles are analogous: your goal is to guess the answer the asker is thinking of, not just to find a correct answer. In turn, the asker should phrase the question such that the correct answer is extra-elegant and cool.
[/QUOTE]
Not necessarily. In a job interview, when they’re used in a non-stupid way, they’re used to show how the interviewee thinks.
So if presented as “come up with an answer,” then the interviewer should look to see whether the inteviewee’s answer was creative, whether it satisfied all of the conditions, whether it was complete, etc. A non-psychic interviewee’s chances of coming up with the same answer as the interviewer are very small. There shouldn’t be a wrong answer. There may be under explained or incomplete answers, but there isn’t a right/wrong.
If presented as “ask questions until you derive the answer” the interviewer look at the quality of the questions asked, whether the interviewee refuses to let go of a wrong path (“is it a giraffe,” “no.” “does it have four legs?” “no.” “sure it isn’t a giraffe?” is a bad set of questions), whether the interviewee tends to ask broad questions, narrow questions, whether they ask first/think second or think first/ask second, what kinds of thoughts the interviewee goes through while trying to discover the twist. Here there is a right answer, but it shouldn’t matter whether the interviewee got the answer, but what they did along the way to failure or success.
Grrrr. The real answer to that problem, of course, is that… the bridge was engineered to withstand loads in excess of its nominal limit, and in any case 202 is the same as 200 even given two significant figures, and I very much doubt that the load limit of the bridge was given as 2.0 * 10^2 pounds.
[/QUOTE]
Thank you. Now, your answer is a reason to give that silly puzzle to children (particularly if you want to teach the difference between ‘mass’ and ‘weight’).
[QUOTE=RaftPeople]
Now we only have 528,439,277 possible answers.
Good try but there is no way to save that “riddle”.
[/QUOTE]
These “riddles” are not supposed to be answered by a person making a single guess. It’s a “twenty questions” process where the guesser asks questions and the person with the solution answers by yes or no. The challenge is coming to the “correct” answer as fast as possible. The questions help you weed out the “wrong” answers.
Asking these as part of a job interview, expecting one answer, but without going through the series of yes/no questions, would indeed be a pointless exercise and a total misunderstanding of the game involved.
[QUOTE=volleyballer]
A man lives in a multistory apartment building, on the 8th floor. When he comes home, on days when the weather’s good, or if no one else is waiting for the elevator, he takes the stairs up. Else, in bad weather, or if he has someone to ride up with, he takes the elevator.
Why?
[/QUOTE]
Because the stairs are on the outside of the building.
