Math Aunty

The title of this post reminds me of Dr. Seuss. I love Dr. Seuss.

 

I first attempted to play the little game like this where you try to get all the balls to the center…

 

but I just followed the “start” of the crazy shape thingy but that didn’t work when I made several examples on my own paper because there were some where you couldn’t tell where the thing started! So I started to shade what I thought was the inside and outside different colors but that also didn’t work for every single maze I drew (and the ones I forced my roommate to draw for the random factor). 

Dave’s problem solving seminar really helps with the problems of the week! I’m spending less time frustrated and more time being proactive! 🙂

 

Anyways, 

I began to count the number of times you crossed a path of the maze to get to the inside but that only worked in conjunction with the shading and when I did the shading wrong

 

Sooooooooooo… I instead counted the number of times I crossed a line. Success! If I crossed an odd number of times, the dot WAS in the shape. If I crossed an even number of times, the shape was not. The best method for solving this problem was to draw a triangle. If you crossed the line once, you’re inside a triangle. If you cross twice, you’re outside of the triangle. I did this with a bunch of different simple shapes and then with more complex mazes to verify.

1.) Place an arbitrary point anywhere on the outside of the shape.

2.) Draw a line (preferably a different color than the maze) connecting the arbitrary point to the dots inside of the maze.

3.) Count the number of times the line you drew crosses the maze.

4.) If the number is odd, the dot is inside of the maze. If the number is even, the dot is outside of the maze.

🙂