problem solving

3Blue1Brown walks through a very hard Putnam competition problem and its elegant solution, emphasizing the visual intuition and the thought process behind solving it.

A BBC Earth clip from Inside the Animal Mind in which a crow named 007 solves an eight-step puzzle to get a reward. It showcases crow problem-solving.

A Computerphile video in which Mark Jago of the University of Nottingham explains Turing's halting problem and how it led to the blueprint for the modern computer.

Numberphile with Daniel Erman on the Josephus problem, where people in a circle are eliminated in turn. It shows how the survivor's position follows a neat pattern tied to powers of two and binary.

Robert Miles introduces the first of several videos on the paper 'Concrete Problems in AI Safety', focusing on how AI systems can cause accidental negative side effects. It explains the problem in accessible terms.

Numberphile with Tim Browning on the sum-of-three-cubes problem and why 33 was the lowest unsolved case. The description notes a later solution for 33.

Dave Jones of EEVblog investigates why a 4K BenQ monitor switches itself off, tracing it to static discharge from an office chair. He uses an oscilloscope to examine the static impulses.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why handling time and timezones in code is so hard, walking through a simple web app that computes how long ago something happened. It covers the quirks of timezones and calendars and ends in an exasperated rant.

Veritasium's Derek Muller argues that Facebook's business model works against pages and creators, because it charges them to reach the audiences they built. He explains how filtering and paid promotion undermine the value of likes.

CGP Grey explains how traffic jams come from human driving behavior such as tailgating and reaction delays, and how leaving gaps and smoothing speed would reduce congestion. It also touches on self-driving cars.

Real Engineering looks at the numbers for running California on renewables, focusing on the large energy storage needed. It argues about the cost of batteries and the role of other sources.

Tantacrul examines sonification, the practice of turning data into sound or music, and critiques how scientists and musicians, including NASA and CERN projects, use it well and poorly.

Mathologer shows a simple idea, the commutator, that lets anyone who can solve the first layer design their own full Rubik's cube solution. The same idea carries over to other symmetric twisty puzzles such as the Megaminx.

Big Clive tears down a smart meter with a wireless modem found among fly-tipped materials. He examines its internals and checks conspiracy claims about microphones, cameras and 5G.

Steve Yegge's OSCON Data 2011 talk imagines what you could do with Google-scale storage and compute a decade later. He argues smart people should work on hard problems such as biology rather than cat pictures, and the talk ends with a moment many took as him quitting Google.

A scene from Moneyball in which Brad Pitt's character argues with scouts who pick players on intangible impressions instead of performance data. It is a four-minute clip.

A short Art of the Problem clip explaining Diffie-Hellman key exchange, using a paint mixing analogy for one-way functions and touching on modular arithmetic and discrete logarithms.

An older 3Blue1Brown video on why topology matters, built around the inscribed rectangle problem. It walks through how tori and Mobius strips appear in the solution. The channel later replaced it with an updated version.

NASA JPL engineers explain the final minutes of the Curiosity rover's entry, descent and landing on Mars, which combined aerobraking, a parachute and a skycrane. It lays out the tight sequence of events that all had to work automatically.

Steven Pinker's TED talk presents data on homicide, war, poverty and pollution to argue that the world has improved over the past decades. He frames progress as problem-solving, not inevitability.

An excerpt from Russell Barkley's lecture on ADHD, focusing on inhibition, impulsivity and emotional regulation. It explains ADHD as a problem of response inhibition and emotional impulsivity.

A Last Week Tonight segment in which John Oliver explains the US nuclear waste storage problem, including the Yucca Mountain politics. It argues the country needs a safe place to store waste.

A short explainer on the history and mechanics of public key cryptography and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. It uses a mixing-paint-colors analogy to show how two parties can agree on a shared secret in public.

James Mickens of Harvard gives a funny lecture at HBS's Future Assembly arguing that blockchains are a very bad idea. He covers their trust, legal and practical shortcomings for real-world problems.

A short clip of Dr. Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars, answering why humanity should go to Mars. He argues that societies grow by challenging themselves and that exploration inspires young people.

MinutePhysics, with 3Blue1Brown, explains Bell's theorem using a Venn diagram paradox and polarizing filters. It shows why no local hidden variable theory can reproduce quantum correlations.

CGP Grey argues that aging and death are a problem worth defeating, using a short animated essay. It is part of a pair with a follow-up from Kurzgesagt.

John Scholes builds a depth-first tree-search operator step by step in a Dyalog APL session. It covers higher-order functions and runs the search on the N-Queens problem.

A Last Week Tonight segment on the US nuclear arsenal and how poorly it is maintained and secured. It covers weapons accidents, outdated launch protocols and security problems.

A Kurzgesagt animated explainer on whether aging could be cured within our lifetimes, made with Lifespan.io and the LEAF foundation. It introduces the idea of treating aging as a medical problem.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on payday loans and predatory lending, covering how they trap borrowers and target the elderly and military. It features Sarah Silverman.

Comedian Dominic Frisby gives a ten-minute explanation of land value tax. He argues it would fix problems of rent-seeking and the economics of land ownership.

An RSA Animate adaptation of a Slavoj Zizek talk on charitable giving and ethical consumerism. It argues that buying products that bundle a charity donation can sustain the system that causes the problems.

Technology Connections explains why the superheterodyne radio has its name and how mixing frequencies lets it tune stations well. It walks through the underlying wave phenomena and algebra and why the design solved a hard tuning problem.

Tom Wildenhain's SIGBOVIK 2018 presentation of WordTeX, a Microsoft Word template that mimics LaTeX typesetting output. It is a joke research project executed with serious effort.

Cockpit footage of a Swiss Airbus A340 crew dealing with rising oil temperature in one engine on a Zurich to Shanghai flight, ending with a safety landing. It shows the pilots' procedures through the emergency.

A short RepresentUs explainer on how money corrupts American politics and what an anti-corruption act could do about it. It covers lobbying, super PACs and campaign finance, and pitches the group's proposed reforms. The video was later superseded by an updated version.

A 20-minute Y Combinator interview in which Sam Altman asks Elon Musk how to build the future. Topics include which problems a 22-year-old should work on, such as AI, genetics, and brain interfaces, and general advice for founders.

The final chapter of Rich Rebuilds' saga about buying a used Tesla Model X that went missing, with cameo appearances and the end of the dispute. It is part of a longer series on the problems he had with Tesla.

Conrad Wolfram argues that the part of math taught in schools, hand calculation, is tedious and mostly irrelevant to real mathematics. He proposes teaching math through computer programming so students can tackle real problems.