I wrote a (very long) blog post about those viral math problems and am looking for feedback, especially from people who are not convinced that the problem is ambiguous.
It's about a 30min read so thank you in advance if you really take the time to read it, but I think it's worth it if you joined such discussions in the past, but I'm probably biased because I wrote it :)
Damn ragebait posts, it's always the same recycled operation. They could at least spice it up, like the discussion about absolute value. What's |a|b|c|?
What I gather from this, is that Geogebra is superior for not allowing ambiguous notation to be parsed 👌
Your example with the absolute values is actually linked in the "Even more ambiguous math notations" section.
Geogebra has indeed found a good solution but it only works if you input field supports fractions and a lot of calculators (even CAS like WolframAlpha) don't support that.
Yeah! That's why I mentioned it, it was a fresh ambiguous notation problem that I've never encountered before. Discussions of "is it 1 or 9" get tiring quickly.
At least WA and others tell you how they interpret the input, instead of being a black box (until you get to the manuals). Even though it is obvious in hindsight, I didn't get why two calculators would yield different results; thanks!
Nice write-up.
Except that isn't ambiguous either. See my reply to the original comment.
Geogebra has done the same thing as Desmos, which is wrong. Desmos USED TO give correct answers, but then they changed it to automatically interpret / as a fraction, which is good, except when they did that it ALSO now interprets ÷ as a fraction, which is wrong. ½ is 1 term, 1÷2 is 2 terms (but Desmos now treats it as 1 term, which goes against the definition of terms)
The absolute value of a, times b, times the absolute value of c (which would be more naturally written as b|ac|). Unlike brackets, there's no such thing as nested absolute value. If you wanted it to read as the absolute value of (a times the absolute value of b times c), then that's EXACTLY the same answer as the absolute value of (a times b times c), which is why nested absolute values make no sense - you only have to take absolute value once to get rid of all the contained signs.