Feynman vs. The Abacus

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2021-07-23 20:00:07

A Japanese man came into the restaurant. I had seen him before, wandering around; he was trying to sell abacuses. He started to talk to the waiters, and challenged them: He said he could add numbers faster than any of them could do.

The waiters didn't want to lose face, so they said, "Yeah, yeah. Why don't you go over and challenge the customer over there?"

The man asked a waiter to call out some numbers to add. He beat me hollow, because while I was writing the numbers down, he was already adding them as he went along.

I suggested that the waiter write down two identical lists of numbers and hand them to us at the same time. It didn't make much difference. He still beat me by quite a bit.

The man then made a mistake: he proposed we go on to division. What he didn't realize was, the harder the problem, the better chance I had.

The bothered the hell out of the Japanese man, because he was apparently well trained on the abacus, and here he was almost beaten by this customer in a restaurant.

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