1 00:00:00,464 --> 00:00:01,880 PROFESSOR: You know, to be honest, 2 00:00:01,880 --> 00:00:05,870 for the most part, I did what I had to do, 3 00:00:05,870 --> 00:00:09,110 went through the standard process-- 4 00:00:09,110 --> 00:00:14,060 generally, I was-- it didn't take me long to do that-- 5 00:00:14,060 --> 00:00:20,090 until I finally ran into an eighth grade teacher who 6 00:00:20,090 --> 00:00:22,610 basically realized that I was pretty 7 00:00:22,610 --> 00:00:25,080 bored by the standard problems in the class 8 00:00:25,080 --> 00:00:28,190 and was able to get through it without much trouble, 9 00:00:28,190 --> 00:00:30,740 and he gave me the opportunity to do some work on my own, 10 00:00:30,740 --> 00:00:32,902 and gave me problems to work on my own 11 00:00:32,902 --> 00:00:35,360 that were not in the textbook and were very unlike anything 12 00:00:35,360 --> 00:00:36,650 I've ever seen. 13 00:00:36,650 --> 00:00:38,454 And then he convinced me to-- 14 00:00:38,454 --> 00:00:40,370 at that time, there weren't all these contests 15 00:00:40,370 --> 00:00:42,369 that I mentioned, but there was one in Colorado. 16 00:00:42,369 --> 00:00:44,060 And he convinced me to try and take it. 17 00:00:44,060 --> 00:00:47,600 And, you know, I thought I was pretty smart, 18 00:00:47,600 --> 00:00:51,620 as a lot of young teenagers do, and took the test. 19 00:00:51,620 --> 00:00:53,600 And most of the tests, I found easy, 20 00:00:53,600 --> 00:00:55,310 but there were a few problems on there 21 00:00:55,310 --> 00:00:57,880 that stunned me because they seemed like totally 22 00:00:57,880 --> 00:00:58,880 simple trivial problems. 23 00:00:58,880 --> 00:01:00,531 But I had no idea how to solve them. 24 00:01:00,531 --> 00:01:02,030 I didn't even know how to start even 25 00:01:02,030 --> 00:01:05,717 thinking about the problem, and that actually both, you know, 26 00:01:05,717 --> 00:01:07,550 sort of annoyed me, but it also intrigued me 27 00:01:07,550 --> 00:01:10,910 that there were problems out there that clearly people 28 00:01:10,910 --> 00:01:12,840 expected you to be able to figure out. 29 00:01:12,840 --> 00:01:15,179 But I no idea how to do it. 30 00:01:15,179 --> 00:01:17,720 And I can actually even remember the problem that stumped me. 31 00:01:17,720 --> 00:01:19,970 I ended up spending a good chunk of the test 32 00:01:19,970 --> 00:01:21,410 just trying to figure this problem out and of course 33 00:01:21,410 --> 00:01:22,884 did very, very poorly as a result. 34 00:01:22,884 --> 00:01:24,050 But I couldn't let go of it. 35 00:01:24,050 --> 00:01:28,550 It was you have a child's toy that's made up of cubes, 36 00:01:28,550 --> 00:01:30,410 and each of these cubes is painted 37 00:01:30,410 --> 00:01:31,520 with six different colors. 38 00:01:31,520 --> 00:01:33,520 Each side is a different color-- same six colors 39 00:01:33,520 --> 00:01:34,700 are used for all the cubes. 40 00:01:34,700 --> 00:01:37,550 And the question was simply, how many-- and all the cubes 41 00:01:37,550 --> 00:01:39,477 are different, so no-- you pick up two cubes. 42 00:01:39,477 --> 00:01:41,810 You can't rotate one to make it the same as another one. 43 00:01:41,810 --> 00:01:44,600 And the question was how many cubes are there? 44 00:01:44,600 --> 00:01:47,510 And I thought about it, and I thought about it, 45 00:01:47,510 --> 00:01:48,470 and I thought about it. 46 00:01:48,470 --> 00:01:50,178 And I couldn't come up with a good answer 47 00:01:50,178 --> 00:01:52,516 in the course of the test, but that's 48 00:01:52,516 --> 00:01:54,390 one of the questions we answer in the course. 49 00:01:54,390 --> 00:01:57,250 And now I can give you a very simple answer.