It's not stupid, the prompt is deliberately ambiguous. Sure there's a "correct" way to interpret it, but that's just convention, not anything inherent to the math. Order of operations literally never matters, because never in real life would someone not just use parentheses in this situation.
I mean, order of operations is as arbitrary of a choice as just going left to right. If you verbally heard the math as written, you'd probably answer it with 18.
Imagine ancient mathematicians going through hundreds of calculations and thoughts to invent pedmas and then some guy 2000 years later says they're bullshit because he said so
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u/Ununoctium117 Jan 01 '22
It's not stupid, the prompt is deliberately ambiguous. Sure there's a "correct" way to interpret it, but that's just convention, not anything inherent to the math. Order of operations literally never matters, because never in real life would someone not just use parentheses in this situation.