Thinking too hard
There was a careers fair here at UQ the other day, and one of the employers hunting for graduates was the Defense Signals Directorate, which is an Australian civillian organisation specialising in foreign intelligence and information security within Australia. They had a clever gimmick where they put a puzzle on their info sheets, saying that if you could solve it you might be the candidate they were looking for. It was:
If
CHAD = 3
FIJI = 4
FRANCE = 8
KYRGYZSTAN = 9
MYANMAR = 10
NIGERIA = 12
Which country has the value of 5?
I spent probably half an hour looking at this, analysing, thinking, assigning numerical values to letters, etc. I then passed it to my friend’s mum, who looked at it for about 30 seconds, and said “I’ve got it.” And she did, too!
I won’t reveal the solution here (though you can find it on the net, if you want) but it wasn’t anything like as complicated as the schemes I was trying to come up with. In my defense, I’d tried to look for something along the lines of the solution, but just hadn’t seen it, and moved on to other things. Just shows that sometimes a fresh perspective can help - which I guess supports all the interdisciplinary science going on at the moment!