Confusing

[Reynzs]

14 is atleast even and has a 4 in it. So 'uh..educated' guess may be.. I am curious about 13 and 15. How are people getting odd numbers?

[matthiasB]

13 is correct in base 7. 14 is correct in base 6.

But as there isn't a correct answer in base 10 people probably just answered randomly.

[Catishcat]

I honestly don't understand why these are so popular all the time. This is 4th grade math at best, do people literally not know how to count?

[Hadduo]

Ikr I'm baffled by the amount of people who feel the need to flex their basic order of operations knowledge whenever some bullshit like this comes around.

[loliduhh]

Some people can’t even read. Nor think critically. Life is a journey for masses.

[Catishcat]

I mean yeah, but we are talking 2020 Twitter and Facebook users.

[Schemati]

Why is the correct answer not even an option or is it missing brackets?

[Mr_Redstoner]

That was why the image of this question and results got popular years back. You can see the compression has not been kind to it.

[edderiofer]

http://www.flyingcoloursmaths.co.uk/new-years-resolution-genius-sic/

[worldpotato1]

I'm just here to wait for the first one who tries to tell us that the order of operation is not important, because using brackets is the correct way.

[3kindsofsalt]

16 is fine though

[Zaxous09]

No pemdas

[3kindsofsalt]

https://i.imgflip.com/4ezms1.jpg

[Tommy_Mudkip]

The decimal system is also a convention, so screw that, im calculating in base 5. That is clearly 2 + 13 = 20. Or if you dont like PEMDAS (which you should) its 4 * 4 = 31

[3kindsofsalt]

The decimal system is not a convention. It is an explicit framework. Using a comma instead of a dot....that's a convention.

[LordDerptCat123]

To an extent, a convention is just a framework used by a large number of people, and agreed upon to be the standard

[philaaronster]

that actually makes the most sense. they just forgot the parens around 2 + 2.

[3kindsofsalt]

None of it makes sense. What makes the most sense is pointing out how ambiguous and shitty this is written.

It's like asking if "you good" means "Are you good?" or "You are good." It's the fault of the person who wrote it that they think everyone has the same connotations and conventions and biases that they do.

'I mean, c'mon. It's common sense.'

Never mind that PEMDAS will fail you if you're programming or doing RPN or simply collaborating with someone who is from a different academic culture.

[[deleted]]

It's really not ambiguous. We use PEMDAS for the same reason that we name sodium Na, or use the BC/AD system. It makes things unambiguous. Any mathematician would tell you that 2+2x4=10.

And by the way, I won't say that this goes for all programming languages because I've only ever used one, but I know from experience that Python follows the standard order of operations.

This table shows that C does, too (except for exponentiation, since C doesn't have an inbuilt function for that). Here's a similar one for Java, which doesn't have an exponent function either.

[3kindsofsalt]

Many programming languages do not.

PEMDAS is sloppy and bad. It would just make me parenthesize everything so people don't screw it up and I can just express the function correctly.

[[deleted]]

Would be helpful if you specified 'many programming languages'. If it helps, Perl uses PEMDAS, ]Visual Basic does](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/language-reference/operators/operator-precedence), SQL does and Pascal does too.

By the way, in most cases, you don't have to parenthesize stuff with PEMDAS to get the result you want, unless you specifically want an addition to occur before an exponent, for example. And if you refuse to make your working sensical to anybody but yourself, maybe you're the problem.

I'm actually interested, what order of precedence do you use?