Your video, The Horse Horseshoe Boots Viral Algebra Problem, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 88 Badge!

I would never down vote a video like this simply because it offends my knowledge of math and logic and irritates the hell out of me. These kind of problems have been coming my way on facebook repeatedly and they do get huge numbers of comments with wildly different solutions. Actually out of the 500,000 comments claimed for this one probably half of them give 42 as the answer. My problem comes from the assumption that an algebraic variable represented by a symbol (an image of a boot) bears some inherent relationship to a different symbol (two boots). Even if you make that leap that two boots is two separate variables, if there is no operand between them they should be multiplied, not added. In algebra a term such as 3AB equals 3 times A times B not 3+A+B. Unfortunately in this problem with two horseshoes equaling 4 it works either way but if two boots equals 2 then one should equal the square root of two and the correct solution would be 21.414.

I think it's a good, interesting post. Thanks for posting it.

It's a bit 'unfair' in that it seeks to trick people using the different number of images and then Order of Operations, but I think it's still a fun little puzzle.

As for the 'logical'-ness of assuming 2 of something equals 2 x 1 of something I think it's pretty logical; however, the image does force you to make the assumption that the image representing 2 horseshoes is logically related to the image representing one horseshoe. It's perfectly logical to assume they're not 2 totally unrelated images and yet they still 'could' be.

http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2016/09/07/the-horse-horseshoe-boots-viral-brain-teaser-the-correct-answer-explained/

From everything I've read, including this link, it's really just a basic algebra problem. What appears to make it difficult is that people who don't use algebra and math all the time will not know the specific rules with equations.

As far as posting it, why do we post anything here? This piqued my interest and I thought it might be something others would enjoy. If it isn't something you care for, don't vote or down vote.

I got 22..


Horse is 10, each horseshoe is 2, so double horseshoe is 4, cowboy boot is 1, so double boot is 2


also I didn't watch the video just saw the problems on the thumbnail

It's close though. And, I'm changing the quote to "Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, cluster bombs, iPhone app development, and sex."

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto' to 'Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto, Stompin, Tom Connors' - edited by notarobot

I like the horseshoe crab. It's the closest living relative to the trilobites, but according to Richard Fortey, the Trilobite expert, they're not good eating.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Horseshoe-Crab-A-true-blue-blood

Horseshoe Crab: A true blue blood (Weirdness) has been added as a related post - related requested by oritteropo.

Scenes include (in order of appearance):

Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest
Mono Lake
Joshua Tree National Park
Alabama Hills
Lunar Eclipse of December 2010
Monument Valley
Salton Sea
Tuscon, Arizona
Jeju Island, South Korea
Yosemite National Park
Petrified Forest National Park
Death Valley National Park
Horseshoe Bend

7:52 has horseshoes up his ass

No I don't know the html tag

Oh nO! Watch out for the deadly throwing horseshoes!

This is inches away from being hysterical. Acting, editing, timing are all just... off. Upvote anyway -- this isn't horseshoes -- close can still score

this can obviously turn into a long conversation but i think there's a difference between don hurtzfeldt (i'm unfamiliar with the second one and the 3rd one gives me a 404) and this video. his work is stylized to look rough whereas this video is simply poorly executed (from a technical standpoint). hurtzfeldt cartoons are actually brilliant from a technical standpoint and he uses the inherent flaws in the medium to his advantage. i don't think this video does anything like that.

i get what you're saying and i totally agree that storytelling doesn't require things to be shiny. my only point is that the work done on this is sub par when compared to equal projects. not sub par when compared to feature length films by major studios. as far as my "insults", they aren't baseless and i would argue that i'm not insulting the artist either. i used accurate comparison and i didn't use any pejoratives.

[i just read they worked on it for 8 months at what i would assume was effectively full time as it was their final year project for school.]

anyway, i'm not trying to argue that people would be wrong to like this i'm just defending my point. thank you for the high five for getting into VFX. it's a crazy tough industry to get your foot in the door. personally, i have good friends in good places, a decent eye, and a horseshoe up my ass.