Dec 2

Counting or Measuring

I whish this was not Dalle/ChatGPT generated. If you can do figures and want wo work with us, drop us a mail.

Christmas time begins with an inventory of the reindeer fleet. Helmi scratched her head, eyeing the bustling reindeer with growing skepticism. Santa had insisted on expanding the herd this year once again. Counting them individually had proven tedious, and multiplying stables by boxes felt far too theoretical for the chaos at hand. Instead, she wheeled out the trusty weighing machine—a beautifully intricate device with a large, circular scale and a needle that danced with every shift of weight. Helmi set it just outside the gate and sprinkled a trail of oats to coax the reindeer through, one by one. As they trotted onto the platform, the needle swung and settled, tallying the collective weight of the herd. Helmi jotted down the reading and grinned. “Twelve reindeer, each 100 pounds, together 1,205 pounds,” she mused, the math now undeniable. The reindeer themselves seemed pleased, snorting approval at her analog ingenuity.

Helmi used a trick: He did not do the slow and error-prone arithmetics himself, for instance by multiplying stables by boxes. Instead, he let the reindeers do the math for him, just by reading off the scale at a single time once the herd was in place. Measuring instead of computing is very powerful. What statements can you make about the properties of this computational approach?