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I agree with your title suggestion. The author phrases the problem in an intentionally misleading way: "They examined the fuselages of all the damaged planes th
by djokkataja 12y ago
I agree with your title suggestion. The author phrases the problem in an intentionally misleading way: "They examined the fuselages of all the damaged planes that had flown back after being hit to see where the most damage was. It turned out that the engines had an average of 1.11 bullet holes per square foot, the fuel system had 1.55, the fuselages 1.73, and the rest of the plane 1.8."
He says that they checked to see where the most damage was, but really they were checking to see where the least damage was. If the planes were able to fly back with terrible damage to everything except for one part, then adding armor to that part is a pretty obvious solution.
On the other hand, figuring out exactly how much armor to add is much more complicated, because you have the constraints of weight, production time, etc, plus you have to have some kind of estimate for the effectiveness of the armor in actual combat. I would probably go with "Most Real-World Math Problems Do Not Have a Unique Right Answer".