
What would Feynman do? (2011) - sergeant3
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2011/02/14/what-would-feynman-do.aspx
======
yawaramin
Ha, ha. Actually Feynman believed that software was a time sink, and would
lead you down a rabbit hole of doing busywork solving puzzles that arose from
creating levels of abstraction on top of each other.

As it turns out, he was mostly right!

~~~
Coding_Cat
"Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the
computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a
very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble
with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. You have these
switches--if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do
that--and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are
clever enough, on one machine."

Straight from the man himself. Page 79 of [PDF warning]
[http://buffman.net/ebooks/Richard_P_Feynman-
Surely_Youre_Jok...](http://buffman.net/ebooks/Richard_P_Feynman-
Surely_Youre_Joking_Mr_Feynman_v5.pdf)

------
harry8
I'm pretty sure this is what Feynman wouldn't do. What he would do is be
extremely confrontational from the start if he _had_ to be there, eg his army
psychological assessment, or just walk out if he didn't. If there was one
defining characteristic of the man on the subject it was not suffering this
kind of foolishness.

Nobody mentioned Feynman's work for "Thinking machines" A couple more Feynman
computing links:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA)
[http://www.scribd.com/doc/52657907/Feynman-Lectures-on-
Compu...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/52657907/Feynman-Lectures-on-
Computation#scribd)

~~~
Intermernet
True, but I think he may have had some fun with the interviewer, and thought
it may be worth taking him down a peg or two.

Feynman was amazingly good at giving serious smackdowns in a convivial way. He
would be cheerful, accepting and charming while creating a logical argument
that was almost always faultless.

He had some negatives, but I think he was one of the most amazing people to
have ever lived. I encourage everyone out there to read and watch his
publications and lectures. From grad student til death, he forced people to
rethink the hardest and most important problems around, and he had fun doing
it.

He was also a prankster, a lock-picker and safe-cracker, and apparently a
pretty good musician.

</hero_worship>

------
copsarebastards
I would turn one switch on, walk into the other room and see which light
turned on, then walk back into the first room, flip another switch, and go
back and see which light was turned on.

When inevitably someone came to my desk and asked why I was violating
procedure, I would say that my way was simpler and more efficient than the
alternatives, and therefore saves the company time and money. I would then
offer to change my behavior if they had a better solution to the problem.

This is a management problem, not a logic problem.

------
stolio
As much as yawaramin's comment about him poking fun at programmers is probably
correct, Feynman wasn't a total stranger to computer science:

> Feynman worked out the program for computing Hopfield's network on the
> Connection Machine in some detail. The part that he was proudest of was the
> subroutine for computing logarithms. I mention it here not only because it
> is a clever algorithm, but also because it is a specific contribution
> Richard made to the mainstream of computer science. He invented it at Los
> Alamos.

[http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-
machine...](http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/)

~~~
bane
If you read his books (which he dictates) he also appears to have come up with
a basic concept of parallelism and pipelining which he managed to do on
punchcard machines of the time by mixing up groups of different computations
in the punchchard stacks based on dependent variables in the computations they
were doing.

Here's another telling of the story

[http://www.mphpa.org/classic/HISTORY/H-06c18.htm](http://www.mphpa.org/classic/HISTORY/H-06c18.htm)

 _The new IBM punched-card machines were devoted to calculations to simulate
implosion, and Metropolis and Feynman organized a race between them and the
hand-computing group. "We set up a room with girls in it. Each one had a
Marchant. But one was the multiplier, and another was the adder, and this one
cubed, and all she did was cube this number and send it to the next one," said
Feynmann. For one day, the hand computers kept up: "The only difference was
that the IBM machines didn't get tired and could work three shifts. But the
girls got tired after a while."

Feynmann worked out a technique to run several calculations in parallel on the
punched-card machines that reduced the time required. "The problems consisted
of a bunch of cards that had to go through a cycle. First add, then multiply,
and so it went through the cycle of machines in this room - slowly - as it
went around and around. So we figured a way to put a different colored set of
cards through a cycle too, but out of phase. We'd do two or three problems at
a time," explained Feynman. Three months were required for the first
calculation, and Feynman's technique reduced it to two or three weeks._

------
tzmudzin
I'm surprised the alleged Niels Bohr baromoter story did not show up here yet:
[http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometer.asp](http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometer.asp)

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paulajohnson
Feynman loved logical puzzles, and knew lots of them off by heart. What would
actually have happened is that the interviewer would have got as far as "there
are three light switches..." when Feynman would have interrupted by reciting
the correct answer.

~~~
mkagenius
No, he wouldn't let her know that he knew it in advance :)

------
latch
There's another, shorter one, answering the "why are manhole covers round"
question:
[http://www.sellsbrothers.com/posts/details/12395](http://www.sellsbrothers.com/posts/details/12395)

~~~
loco5niner
This one is actually linked to in the article, where the author writes "In
that tradition, I present a sequel to Keith Michaels' 2003 exercise in
counterfactual reasoning. "

------
parennoob
I'm no Feynman, but the "what if all three bulbs had been continuously lit for
12 hours previously, and were _all_ hot" objection always occurred to me after
hearing the solution to this so-called brain teaser.

In my opinion, this looks like the sort of question originally posed by some
pointy-haired type who had been reading too much 90s "Lateral Thinking" style
pop lit.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Fundamentally these types of questions are a tacit admission that the
organization in question is incompetent at the task of identifying qualified
employees.

Can you imagine hiring a surgeon, or a civil engineer, or, hell, a mechanic or
carpenter based on brain-teaser questions? Nope. The interviewee would look at
you like you'd grown an extra head, and probably start trying to figure out a
way to bring the interview to an early end.

~~~
tjradcliffe
These sorts of questions are psychological, not logical. They require the
person being asked to make the same assumptions about the ambiguities and open
questions as the person asking.

As such, they have nothing to do with reasoning ability. The "correct" answer
is often completely wrong, like the claim that access hole covers are round
"so they don't fall in", which misses the important point entirely. A circle
is the _minimum size_ cover that can't be dropped into the hole it covers.
Make the cover twice as big as the hole and you have no problem. It is only
under the _common but special_ case of resource constraints that round covers
are compelling.

There was also that ridiculous one about "how do you put an elephant in a
refrigerator" where the "correct" answer depended on not knowing the
difference between the definite and indefinite articles. The next question was
"How do you put a giraffe in _a_ refrigerator" and the "correct" answer was
"You open _the_ refrigerator, take out _the_ elephant, and put in _the_
giraffe". No one who was actually conversant with English could pass the test.

~~~
wmt
_There was also that ridiculous one about "how do you put an elephant in a
refrigerator"_

Don't tell me someone has used that as an interview question? That's a silly
kids joke, after which you'd laugh childishly. There even was a follow up
question, _if an elephant and a giraffe would race, who 'd win_ to give the
other guy a chance to redeem himself.

The joke works a lot better with languages without definite and indefinite
versions of nouns, like Finnish, and you mess up the joke with english where
using the definite preposition would ruin the joke, and the indefinite form is
not honest.

------
Animats
That's precious.

I wonder if interviewers are still asking that question in the era of LED
lamps.

In practice, this is the right answer:
[http://www.zircon.com/products/electrical-breaker-id-
pro.htm...](http://www.zircon.com/products/electrical-breaker-id-pro.html)

~~~
jmgao
LED lights still get pretty hot, e.g. the big metal blob at the bottom of this
one [1] is a heatsink.

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/suml2Ei.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/suml2Ei.jpg)

~~~
snogglethorpe
Very bright LED lights can get hot, but e.g. the LED bulb in the table-lamp
next to me right now (a "40W equivalent" bulb) is still quite cool to the
touch, even though it's been turned on all night (fell asleep without turning
it off!)...

------
Beltiras
I heard Feynman's thick accent in my head while reading that. Well written.

~~~
davidgerard
The great thing about his lectures is hearing high-level physics being
explained in the voice of a Brooklyn taxi driver. Always annoyed me that
Asimov moderated his accent for public consumption.

~~~
stolio
You might really enjoy Leonard Susskind:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR3Msi1YeXQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR3Msi1YeXQ)

He's another New Yorker, from the South Bronx, helped start String Theory back
in the 60's or 70's. He has lots of stuff online:
[http://theoreticalminimum.com/](http://theoreticalminimum.com/)

------
sdrizo
I would round up three people and ask them to each stand near the different
light and ask them to tell me when their light turned on or off.

You might look at this question as a means to discern whether or not you are a
team player.

------
aswanson
Wow. This level of anal spelunking for the privilege to work on speeding up
excel macros and word auto-completion? No thanks.

