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Comment by noahlt | Hacker News Reader

A tangentially related story:

Talented secondary school kids all across America end up doing egg drop competitions all the time. But the rules of each competition are each slightly different. A friend of mine was in a competition which was scored like this:

Score = (intactness of egg, as 1 or 0)/(distance to target)/(mass of egg-protecting device)

While everybody else designed careful egg encasements, but my friend played video games and read sci-fi novels. When it was his turn to test his "device", he grabbed the egg and threw it away from the target, into a nearby bush, which broke the fall and kept the egg intact.

His great distance from the target would have made his score very low. But since he didn't actually have a device, the judges were forced to divide by zero...

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Awesome, but was he awarded the prize?

I was in a similarly poorly specified contest in the 6th grade. The goal was to take a single large sheet of construction paper and build a paper airplane. The only metric was distance covered and weighting your plane was allowed.

Day of the competition everyone else in class has their planes out, while I'm standing around with a sheet of paper. When it was my turn I promptly balled up the paper as tight as I could around a handfull of 1" steel washers and proceeded to throw the thing across the gym, out the doors and into the hallway outside, roughly 2x the distance covered by the closest competitor.

I was promptly disqualified for unspecified reasons.

I was promptly disqualified for unspecified reasons.

In my experience, most teachers really don't like smart-asses. Devil's advocate will say that the accelerations you submitted your imaginary passengers were way too strong.

My story in that vein was in PE: we were to run 20 minutes at the most constant pace to practice our endurance. The grade was taking into account the regularity of your pace (13 points out of 20 if you hit the exact same time for all but the fastest and slowest laps) as well as your average speed (the remaining 7 points).

Not being the most athletic guys, a friend and I went on our way to run 4 laps of exactly 5 minutes to insure a decent 13 out of 20, where a lap should have been in the 30-45s range. Obviously, our little stunt was not really appreciated. :)

I guess contests like these intend to foster out of the box thinking. But once that very out of the box thinking surfaces every competitor cries foul, including (some) teachers. So, do they perform such competitions because they have to? Or do they just fail to see what they engage them to?

My university had this competition with a different twist: - The egg was dropped from a 10-story building - The winner is whoever gets the egg safely to the concrete below in the minimal time. Nothing else matters. (But the judges must be able to see that the egg does indeed touch the concrete).

Most contestants tried to get the egg to drop slowly, e.g. using helium or parachutes.

The winner used a rocket to speed the egg down, and placed the egg within a honey jar. The jar hit the floor and cracked in ~1.5 seconds, the honey absorbed all the shock, and it took 2 more seconds for the egg to roll out of the honey and touch the concrete.

I was in a similar egg drop contest in which devices were scored by weight.

The winning entry was helium balloons attached to a basket. It had a decidedly negative weight.

Very poorly designed indeed. They should have been checking for mass!

Helium balloons still have positive weight. They just have more buyoancy than weight.

Weight is measured in Newton, it's the force that keeps you one earth. Mass is measured in kg.

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