> that approach is a brand of thinking that generally works only on artificial problems, because the key component ("you wouldn't be asking me this if it didn't

> that approach is a brand of thinking that generally works only on artificial problems, because the key component ("you wouldn't be asking me this if it didn't have a well-defined answer") doesn't exist on most problems Perhaps changing the footnote hint "no more information is given" to an integral part of the problem spec, and saying "no more information is required", would make the problem less artificial. There would then be a self-referencial component in the problem definition, self-referentiality being fairly common in nature and engineering.