I feel like a spaz now and I'm questioning myself. Should there be some brackets in the question, or shall I count myself with the inumerate masses ten years my junior?

Not really. The function of brackets in mathematical equations is to make them easier to read and calculate the result without having to sit down and think it through. If that equation was written somewhere and the author actually wanted people to solve it, he/she'd have put brackets in it. Not doing so is simply an attempt to make it ambiguous, which obvious generally you wouldn't do.

'Bloke not being able to intuitively solve equation written in a way as to be intentionally hard to solve' doesn't exactly seem like news to me.

It's like people who write obtuse code on the grounds it's 'more efficient' and then feel smug that being able to interpret it makes them smarter than every one else. No it doesn't, it makes you a moron for writing code that's much harder for someone else to maintain than it needs to be.

Jon

I disagree. Brackets are there to change the order in which calculations are normally processed.

With no brackets there is no ambiguity about which order things need to be done. Putting brackets in would make no difference to it.

They can do that, certainly, but they're also 'punctuation for equations'. Icouldwriteasentencelikethisandyouwouldprobablystillbeabletoreadit but that doesn't mean it's a useful thing to do. It isn't. In the same way, writing an arithmetic equation in a technically correct but non-intuitive way way is pointless, unless the object of the exercise is to test how well people know the rules of arithmetic. And, frankly, I dunno about you but I've never had to do that.


Indeed not - in so far as it doesn't change the answer (assuming you put the brackets in such a way as not to do so). But equations, like words, are also about communicating information - they are meant to be read. While the equation written is efficient arithmetically, it's very poor in communicating information. It is technically unambiguous (as equations always are) but as a method of communicating a pierce of arithmetic, it's suboptimal.

Jon

I feel like a spaz now and I'm questioning myself. Should there be some brackets in the question, or shall I count myself with the inumerate masses ten years my junior?

The biggest issue seems to be that people were adamant that the order in which you do things should run from left to right, rather than following the rules of arithmentic (brackets, division/multiplication, addition/subtraction in that order).

The one that was particularly annoying was the one that went 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1x0 = ?

Most people wanted to put zero...

I disagree. Brackets are there to change the order in which calculations are normally processed.