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I don't know, I always remembered things like 6+7 = 13 and if numbers I was adding were close to 6 and 7 I knew instantly how to proceed. Of course there's othe

I don't know, I always remembered things like 6+7 = 13 and if numbers I was adding were close to 6 and 7 I knew instantly how to proceed. Of course there's other tricks like, subtracting the 1 out of 6 to get 5 and then adding it to 7 making 8 then removing the 5 to get 10 with the other 5 and you are left with 10 and 3 which is easy, I guess. At least for me it was just silly shortcuts that stuck with me like 6+7=13 or 7*7=49. Maybe why I'm little fixated to 7 is that 5 and below is easy, but with 6 and up things get little more "math-y", so with some quick shortcuts like these it's easy to adjust to 7. Or most likely I'm just full of shit, that is usually the case.

qb45 11y ago
I think that's what you get with unsupervised learning. Tricks only get you so far, you can't do 6+7 on fingers or 7·7 as (4+3)(4+3) (I had a huge problem with this one, too many numbers to track). So you fail. And when you fail, you memorize the problematic cases and go on with tricks based on those. And yes, it's completely incomprehensible for people who learned the pencil-and-paper algorithms and think that those are the end of the world.
- Double_Cast 11y ago
  The real trick is nothing more than the distributive property. (2)(16) = (2)(15 + 1) "Mathematical properties" are just hacks that become popular because they generalize. [0] [0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/03/do-life-hacks-ever-reach-fixation/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/03/do-life-hacks-ever-reac...