After the viral phenomenon of the "Condemned Dress that Changes Color Before Our Eyes", the web has found a new intellectual challenge: the "Singapore Math Problem". A girl decides to test the intelligence of her new friends by giving them different clues so they can calculate her birthday. Within hours, internet users were melting their brains trying to solve it, and it even required the intervention of professional mathematicians to find the answer...
Albert and Bernard have just become friends with Cheryl, and they want to know her birthday. Cheryl hands them a list of ten possible dates (shown in the image below). She then tells Albert the month and Bernard the day, separately. With that information, Albert says he doesn't know Cheryl's birthday, but he is sure Bernard doesn't know either. When Bernard hears this, he says that "at first" he didn't know, but now he does. Upon hearing Bernard's statement, Albert concludes that he also knows. Good for them... because the rest of the planet seems to have no idea when Cheryl's birthday is.
It was initially reported that the exercise was aimed at primary school children in Singapore schools. Later it was confirmed that it is actually a logic problem prepared for 14-year-olds participating in the SASMO Mathematics Olympiad. One might conclude that these problems confirm why Singapore ranks so high in international mathematics performance measurements. The Web adopted this challenge like many others, causing discussions, fights, videos, information exchanges, and of course media coverage. Just like the famous dress, the Singapore math problem also reached television, and several mathematicians decided to solve it once and for all.
I imagine the answer is already as viral as the exercise itself, but if you haven't looked it up and want to give it a try, go ahead. Personally... I didn't even pay enough attention to it. One grows old and loses patience for such things, not to mention that my relationship with mathematics has deteriorated in recent years. The only thing I can add is this: Singapore excels at mathematics, but they need to improve their English. Part of the conflict is not how difficult the problem is, but its weak wording.
