Over the winter break, we watched Candy Cane Lane starring Eddie Murphy. Murphy was unexpectedly more serious in this movie while sillier characters swirled around him. Tracee Ellis Ross, known for her role as Rainbow Johnson in Black-ish, essentially reuses her familiar character as Eddie Murphy’s wife. The movie unfolds around a neighborhood where a spirited competition for the best holiday decorations takes center stage. Soon the movie jumps to a bit of Gremlins meets Jumanji meets The Twelve Days of Christmas. All these themes get a little messy. For me, this made Candy Cane Lane just an okay movie. I don’t think I’d ever re-watch it.
However, there is a scene in the movie that presents a math problem based on The Twelve Days of Christmas. This math problem kept me thinking about the movie more than anything else!
The question boils down to this:
In the song The Twelve Days of Christmas 5 golden rings are received on the fifth day. Write an equation where y equals the total number of golden rings that are received at the end of the song. Use x to represent the number of golden rings received on a single day.
That was the prompt, along with several other iterations, that I gave ChatGPT, Claude and Bard. All three of these AI chatbots had difficult with the problem. They gave me totals of 5, 78 and 75 respectively.
SPOILER ALERT: They figure out in the movie that it is 40 golden rings.
Since I do all my algebra in spreadsheet, I set this up to solve the problem for any of the gifts:
Cell C2 is:
=(12-(A2-1))*A2
I SO wish spreadsheets were part of more math classes.
In math class, this would be:
y = [12-(x-1)]x
That was good enough for me to get the answer but my mother-in-law is a retired HS math teacher and visiting for Christmas, so we HAD to reduce it:
y = -x2 + 13x
Hey! This looks like something we can graph!
While the AI chatbots couldn’t deliver the equation I was looking for, one did help me along the way. I made Claude spit out the list of gifts for the drop down in cell B2. Claude also gave me the formula for cell A2 so it would change according to what was in B2:
=IF(B2="partridge in a pear tree",1,IF(B2="turtle doves",2,IF(B2="french hens",3,IF(B2="calling birds",4,IF(B2="golden rings",5,IF(B2="geese a-laying",6,IF(B2="swans a-swimming",7,IF(B2="maids a-milking",8,IF(B2="ladies dancing",9,IF(B2="lords a-leaping",10,IF(B2="pipers piping",11,IF(B2="drummers drumming",12))))))))))))
There is no way I wanted to type all that on my own.
As a matter of fact, I asked Claude “How many total of each gift were given after this?” and gave it the lines of The Twelve Days of Christmas. It delivered a table of correct answers.
So, out of the three wise AI chatbots I tested for this task, Claude brought the gold!
RSS - Posts
Recent Comments