There's a hilarious CNN story today about a kid who figured out that he could trick his school-issued Texas Instruments calculator into converting decimals to fractions despite the fact that the function was meant to be disabled. Apparently the discovery has led to a massive recall to keep kids from cheating on standardized tests. The response from a school official sounds like it was ripped from an Onion story:
"His fellow students were so proud of him and congratulatory. They thought it was really, really cool. They didn't call him a nerd or anything," said Michael Bolling, a school official in Chesterfield County. The county had more than 11,000 of the calculators recalled.
This all reminds me of a certain twin brother of mine who used to waste away the boredom of highschool math by figuring out ways to trick his very own Texas Instruments calculator into giving slightly incorrect responses by using extreme exponential multiplication or something. I'm sure he remembers every keystroke required. But... oh no, he's not a nerd...
Comments
Nick Burka - June 9, 2005 3:09 pm
My little discoveries were much less exciting, but interesting nonetheless. I'm sure they're well known, but it was fun discovering them myself anyhow:
<ul>
<li>Extra digits: In order to calculate long decimal values, the calculator stores 2 extra digits beyond what you can see on the screen. This means after a few calculations involving decimals, you may eventually see just the value 3 displaying, but the calculator is actually storing 3.00000000001, so subtracting 3 from what appears to be 3 will give you 0.00000000001 and not 0 as expected.</li>
<li>y<sup>x</sup> uses an algorithim and not straight multiplication: I discovered the extra digits above by experimenting with this. If you try 2<sup>3</sup> using the y<sup>x</sup> function, 8 will correctly appear. But, if you subtract 8, you'll get 1<sup>-11</sup>. This is because exponential numbers take considerable calculation and instead an algorithim is used. This isn't noticable on higher numbers, but on low numbers the difference can be seen.</li>
</ul>
m - June 10, 2005 3:55 pm
*cough* nerd.