"Ричард Фейнман. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!/Вы, конечно, шутите, мистер Фейнман! (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

same problem, and I'd do it for them in a flash. So for one guy, to do it
took me twenty minutes, while there were five guys who thought I was a
super-genius.
So I got a fancy reputation. During high school every puzzle that was
known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people
had invented, I knew. So when I got to MIT there was a dance, and one of the
seniors had his girlfriend there, and she knew a lot of puzzles, and he was
telling her that I was pretty good at them. So during the dance she came
over to me and said, "They say you're a smart guy, so here's one for you: A
man has eight cords of wood to chop..."
And I said, "He starts by chopping every other one in three parts,"
because I had heard that one.
Then she'd go away and come back with another one, and I'd always know
it.
This went on for quite a while, and finally, near the end of the dance,
she came over, looking as if she was going to get me for sure this time, and
she said, "A mother and daughter are traveling to Europe..."
"The daughter got the bubonic plague." She collapsed! That was hardly
enough clues to get the answer to that one: It was the long story about how
a mother and daughter stop at a hotel and stay in separate rooms, and the
next day the mother goes to the daughter's room and there's nobody there, or
somebody else is there, and she says, "Where's my daughter?" and the hotel
keeper says, "What daughter?" and the register's got only the mother's name,
and so on, and so on, and there's a big mystery as to what happened. The
answer is, the daughter got bubonic plague, and the hotel, not wanting to
have to close up, spirits the daughter away, cleans up the room, and erases
all evidence of her having been there. It was a long tale, but I had heard
it, so when the girl started out with, "A mother and daughter are traveling
to Europe," I knew one thing that started that way, so I took a flying
guess, and got it.
We had a thing at high school called the algebra team, which consisted
of five kids, and we would travel to different schools as a team and have
competitions. We would sit in one row of seats and the other team would sit
in another row. A teacher, who was running the contest, would take out an
envelope, and on the envelope it says "forty-five seconds." She opens it up,
writes the problem on the blackboard, and says, "Go!" - so you really have
more than forty-five seconds because while she's writing you can think. Now
the game was this: You have a piece of paper, and on it you can write
anything, you can do anything. The only thing that counted was the answer.
If the answer was "six books," you'd have to write "6," and put a big circle
around it. If what was in the circle was right, you won; if it wasn't, you
lost.
One thing was for sure: It was practically impossible to do the problem
in any conventional, straightforward way, like putting "A is the number of
red books, B is the number of blue books," grind, grind, grind, until you
get "six books." That would take you fifty seconds, because the people who
set up the timings on these problems had made them all a trifle short. So
you had to think, "Is there a way to see it?" Sometimes you could see it in
a flash, and sometimes you'd have to invent another way to do it and then do
the algebra as fast as you could. It was wonderful practice, and I got