Unit-7-The-Art-of-Smart-Guessing翻译.doc

Unit 7 The Art of Smart Guessing
Bryan W. Mattimore

1. Several years ago, interviewing candidates for a job, I grew tired of asking "what experience do you have?" So I decided on a one-question quiz to find out how resourceful a thinker the new hire might be. Here it is:

2. You are on a yacht sailing the Pacific Ocean. Your navigator announces you are over the deepest point, the Mariana Trench. Just then, a clumsy guest accidentally drops a 12-pound cannonball over the side. How long will it take for the cannonball to reach the bottom of the Ocean?

3. Before reading on, please try to solve this yourself — paying special attention to how you might solve it.

4. Did you make a completely wild guess because "there wasn't enough information"? Did you get too bogged down in the details trying to come up with the "exactly right" answer? Or did you zero in on the two most important problems — how deep is the Mariana Trench and how fast might a cannonball fall through the water — then hazard a guesstimate?

5. Most of my candidates simply made a wild guess, thinking that they couldn't be 100-percent right. Rarely was someone willing to risk an approximation.

6. What does this have to do with business or creativity? A great deal. In the real world, we frequently need to make decisions when the full information does not exist. From what foods we eat to how to raise our kids, creative people must think for themselves. There may not be the time or the money to make sure of all your decisions. Your best guess will often be the best you can do.

7. Suppose, for example, you've been asked to write a marketing plan for a new telephone device that will send your name, company, address and telephone number to a visual display or printer on another person's phone. In addition to conventional outlets like mass merchandisers and electronics stores, you'd like to know the number of "phone stores" in the United States. Unfortunately, this figure is not available, either from the market-research houses or from the U.S. government. What do you do?

8. One solution would be to go to your local library, pull out a few phone directories from around the country, turn to the Yellow Pages and start counting. You could then guesstimate how many stores per 100,000 people in each of the cities you counted. This, by the way, is exactly what a marketing consultant I know did for a large telecommunications client.

9. The question about phone stores was an example of what scientists call a Fermi problem, named after Nobel Prize-winning scientist Enrico Fermi, who used problems such as this to teach his students how to think for themselves. A Fermi problem does not contain all the information you need to solve it precisely.

10. Fermi is said to have once asked his university students how many piano tuners there were in Chicago. To answer the question, he recommended breaking it down into smaller, more manageable questions, and then having the courage to make some guesses and assumptions. How many people live in Chicago? Three million would be a reasonable estimate. How many people per family? Assume an average of four. How many families own pianos? Say one out of three. Then there were about 250,000 pianos in Chicago. How often would each be tuned? Maybe once every five years. That makes 50,000 tunings a year. How many pianos can one tuner tune in a day? Four? And how many in a year? Assuming 250 working days, one tuner can handle 1,000 pianos a year.

11. So there's work for approximately 50 piano tuners in Chicago — which, as it turns out, is reasonably close to the actual number in the Yellow Pages.

12. Why was guesswork so accurate? The law of averages is partly responsible. At any point, your assumptions may be too high or too low. But because of the law of averages, your mistakes will frequently balance out.

13. Here's another puzzle. You probably already know that black absorbs the most heat, while white reflects the most. But what about the other colors in between? How could you find the answer? Hint: it's wintertime, but not too cold.

14. Ben Franklin's solution was elegant. He simply laid broadcloth samples of various colors on the snow on a sunny morning. "In a few hours," he reported, "the black, being warmed most by the sun, was sunk so low as to be below the stroke of the sun's rays; the dark blue, almost as low; the lighter blue not quite so much as the dark; the other colors, less as they were lighter, and the quite white remained on the surface of the snow, not having entered it at all."

15. One of my favorite "guesstimators" is, west Connecticut inventor Stan Mason, who developed microwave cookware specially designed to position food in the best spot for cooking.

16. To do this, Mason needed to know where the microwave's "hot spots" were — the place where the rays hit the food with the highest intensity. To find out, he put shelves of unpopped popcorn kernels in the microwave and watched to see which kernels popped first. He discovered a pattern in the oven's hottest rays: they weren't in the corners or at the center, but in the shape of a mushroom cloud.

17. Then he designed cooking dishes to fit the pattern. He had come up with a resourceful way to approximate the answer rather than using scientifically sophisticated testing equipment.

18. Fermi would have approved.

19. By the way, the Mariana Trench is about six nautical miles deep, and a cannonball drops at a rate of ten feet per second. So it took the cannonball about an hour to reach the bottom of the trench.

20. Could this be guessed? If you know that Earth's highest point Mount Qomolangma is 29,000 feet, you might reasonably conclude that its lowest point would be close to the same distance. Then you might imagine that a heavy object would take one second to fall through the water of a 10-foot-deep swimming pool. These estimates would bring you close enough to the correct answer.

Chinese Translation of Paragraphs

1. 几年前，我给应聘者面试，问他们“你有什么经验？”这个问题，后来逐渐问烦了。于是，我决定做一项单个问题的测试，从而了解这位新人是不是个善于解决问题的思考者。问题如下：

2. 您乘坐一艘游艇，横渡太平洋。驾驶员告诉您，游艇到了马里亚纳海沟最深的位置。此时，有个笨手笨脚的客人不小心把一个重达12磅的炮弹掉进海里。炮弹沉到海底要多久？
3. 在您往下读之前，请先来回答这个问题——要特别注意解题方法。

4. 您是不是因为“信息不够”就完全瞎猜呢？您是不是过于拘泥于细节，而没能得到“绝对正确”的答案？或者说，您是不是先全神贯注在两个最重要的问题上——马里亚纳海沟有多深？炮弹在水里下沉的速度有多快？——然后才敢做出估计？

5. 大多数的面试者就是胡乱瞎猜，心想反正不可能百分之百地准确。很少有人愿意冒险做个估算。

6. 这与业务或创造性有什么关系吗？关系大着呢。在现实世界里，我们经常在没有充分信息时，需要做出决定。从吃什么到怎样养育孩子，有创意的人必须自己来思考。想要十拿九稳地做出决定，您也许既没有时间也没有金钱。做出最佳的猜测常常是您最佳的选择。

7. 譬如说，假设需要您为一种新的电话设备撰写一份销售计划，这个设备可以将您的姓名、公司、地址和电话号码发送到其他人的电话上，既可视频显示又能打印。除了像大众供货商和电子商店这些传统销售渠道，您得了解美国究竟有多少家“电话商店”。遗憾的是，无论从市场研究部门还是从美国政府的官方数据，都查不到这个数字。那您怎么办？

8. 有一个方法，那就是您到当地的图书馆去，取出全国各地的几本电话号码簿，翻到黄页，然后开始数数。那么，您可以猜出在数过的每个城市里，每十万人有几家电话商店。顺便说一句，我认识的一位营销顾问为一家大型长途通讯客户正是这么做的。

9. 这个关于电话商店的问题是科学家们称之为费米问题的例子。这是以诺贝尔奖获得者恩里科·费米命名的，他用类似的问题教授学生独立思考的方法。费米问题并不包括您所需要准确解决问题的所有信息。

10. 据说，有一次费米问自己的大学生芝加哥有多少个钢琴调音师。要回答这个问题，他提议将问题分解成比较小的、比较容易处理的问题，然后鼓足勇气做些猜测和设想。芝加哥有多少居民？三百万是个合理的估计。每家有几口人？假设平均四个人。有多少人家有钢琴？比如说三家里有一家。那么，芝加哥大约有250,000架钢琴。每架钢琴多久调一次音？或许五年一次。那就一年调50,000次音。一个调音师一天可以调几架钢琴？四架？一年几架？假设有250个工作日，一个调音师一年可以调1,000架钢琴。

11. 因此，芝加哥有大约50名钢琴调音师的工作岗位——果然，这与黄页上的确切数字大致相当。

12. 猜测的结果为什么那么的精确？这与平均律有关系。在某一点上，您的假设也许太高或太低。但是由于平均律的原因，您的差错常会被抵消。

13. 这儿还有一道智力题。很可能您已经知道，黑颜色吸收的热量最多，白颜色反射的热量最多。但是，两者之间的其他颜色怎么样呢？您怎么找到答案呢？提示：在冬天，不太寒冷的时候。

14. 本·富兰克林的解答简明扼要。在一个阳光明媚的上午，他在雪地上铺上各种颜色的平布。“几个小时以后，”他汇报道，“这块黑色的，接受的阳光最多，下沉到阳光晒不到的地方；深蓝色的，几乎低到同样的位置；浅蓝色的到不了深蓝色的位置；其他颜色的，颜色越浅，下沉得越少，而这比较白的还在雪地的表面，根本就没有下沉。”

15. 我最喜爱的猜测者是发明家斯坦·梅森。他发明了微波餐具，为将食品放在烹调最佳的位置上而专门设计的。

16. 要做到这一点，梅森需要知道微波“热点”的位置——就是微波光线以最高强度集中到食品上的地方。为了找到答案，他把没有爆的玉米粒一层层地放在微波炉中，观察哪些玉米先爆。他发现了微波炉最热的微波光线的分布：不是在角落上，也不是在中央，而是呈蘑菇云的形状。

17. 于是，他就设计了符合这个分布的烹调盘子。他很聪明地凭借近似的方法获得了答案，而不是用复杂的科学实验设备算出来的。
18. 费米完全会赞同的。
19. 顺便说一句，马里亚纳海沟大约深6海里，炮弹每秒钟下降10英尺。因此，炮弹沉到沟底需一个小时左右。
20. 这个猜得出来吗？如果您知道地球的最高点珠穆朗玛峰是29,000英尺，您也许会合理地得出结论：最低点大约也是这个距离。然后，您可以想象，一个重物需要1秒钟掉到10英尺深游泳池的底部。这样估计的话，您将得到接近正确的答案。

第 4 页 共 4 页