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Comment by Harvey-Specter | Hacker News Reader

I read the article. The question is stated to be

> "If a ship had 26 sheep and 10 goats onboard, how old is the ship's captain?"

What 'clue' did I miss? The only other information is some speculation from a Weibo commenter who thinks that 26 sheep + 10 goats = 7700kgs.

I supposed you could argue that these 5th grade students should know the minimum age required to have a commercial boat licence, but I couldn't tell you that answer for my country (and we don't know that this is a commercial ship, could just be someone taking his livestock for a jaunt around the lake).

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Rather than needing to know the probable weight of 26 sheep and 10 goats is 7700kgs, you need to know by what margin of error it's probably over 5000kg. And you not only need to know the minimum age of 28 yrs, but also the probable age distribution of people with commercial boat licences, in both China and other countries. Along with knowing risk factors such as piracy rates in areas of the world where live sheep and goats are transported, you can combine all this info into a statistical model useful for actuarial purposes. Perhaps the exam question was searching for primary school kids to fast-track for a career in China's growing Insurance industry.

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No, there isn't. Please quote what other information is provided.

The other information, is the reasonable assumption that there is a minimum age limit for getting a license, and an apprenticeship for larger vessels. As mentioned. Even if you don't know the numbers, you can sketch out that thought process for an answer. Not all algebra is done with constants.

In fact my sister ran the data systems for a large trucking company. Her interview questions included "how many ping pong balls will fit in a semi-truck trailer?" She was looking for any kind of process to arrive at an answer. Most folks just flailed around, helpless because the question didn't include the answer in it (like so many test questions in school).

There still isn't an answer to the problem.

Sure - in the form of bounds (older than...younger than).

This is all about students being taught by rote, with right answers all neat and pat and solvable. Folks educated like that have a problem with questions like this one. Folks who can 'think outside the box' have no issue at all with uncertainty in the answer.

Similarly, folks posting here who can or cannot see that this question is interesting and solvable (do a degree). No, not by 'an answer' but by a variety of approaches.

How many 11 years olds could "sketch out that thought process [about an apprenticeship] for an answer"?

I certainly couldn't have done that.

One of the answers was "must be an adult", which still sets bounds. That sounds like a much more reasonable answer for an 11 year old, while it sounds like you think it's reasonable to require a tighter range. Why?

> Folks who can 'think outside the box' have no issue at all with uncertainty in the answer.

Folks who can "think outside the box" can conceive of a world where "there is no answer to this question" is a meaningful response.

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