"Teach Me How To Dougie" is a hip-hop song by a group called Cali Swag District. And apparently the Dougie is some sort of dance people want to learn that the entire song is about. According to Wikipedia, "The "Dougie" involves "casual shoulder leans and elbow twists," compared to snap dancing."
Now, onto solving the real problem. If everyone one wants to learn how to Dougie, exactly how long might that take? Exactly 48 days. The math is quite simple really. The formula is similar to the Reproducing Rabbits Problem.
Let's assume that only one person in the world knows how to Dougie. If that person teaches another person, then two people know. Since you'll need some time to practice dancing before you go teaching someone new, only the first person goes out the next day and teaches another person. Now 3 people in the world know how. The next day the 3rd person stays home and the first and second go out and teach a person. 5 people know. Are you keeping track of the math here? 1, 2, 3, 5.... Starting to look familiar? It's the Fibonacci Sequence. Which is where you add two numbers in the sequence to get the next number.
According to the US Census Bureau, the world population is currently 6,886,994,856. So using trial and error with this Fibonacci Sequence calculator, we can determine that the 49th number in the sequence is 7,778,742,049 which is the first number larger than the world's population. We take off the first number of the sequence for obvious reasons and now we get the answer of 48 day. Congratulations, everyone knows the dance and we can stop asking everyone to teach it to us.
This formula, of course, assumes that everyone in the world is physically and mentally capable of dancing. Also that they actually want to learn how to do the dance. And that they are capable of teaching. And that no one dies while dancing. And I'm pretty sure you stopped reading this post by now.
This post was partially inspired by the Google Nexus S puzzle from the other day.
No comments:
Post a Comment