MIND GAMES
Five-man soccer
Aditya Rishi

JASMINDER'S mother does not have a good command of English, but she has all the right ideas. She knows where university education can lead her daughter and which way her daughter should now move. She does not share the English passion for soccer, but then, she's still Indian. Already the results are before us: Jasminder has started using her head. My hunch is that she always knew, but sometimes you need motivation to excel and it can come from the least likely sources.

Sometimes, if we can reinvent ourselves, we can shock the opposition. Whoever thought the Lankans would change the way one-day cricket was played in the first 15 overs. Soccer is also reinventing itself and we now have five-men soccer, and then there's mind soccer, which Jas had to play. People do strange things just for kicks, but their goal is not always straight.

Jas had pretty much settled the score last week and there was no problem at all. It was written just for kicks. However, there's always a room for experts. Some of our own experts are with us today to tell us how that shot was played.

Our first expert on the show is Vijayesh Narayan Singh of the Department of Mathematics, Panjab University, Chandigarh. Does he play mind soccer? We don't know. "Let the number that Jas picks from the box be 'x'. When Mike asks Scar to square the number, it becomes x^2. Then Dan adds 10 times the original number to that, so it becomes x^2 + 10x. Bill adds 25 to the number obtained by Dan, so the number becomes x^2 + 10x + 25 which is equal to (x + 5)^2, and takes the square root to the nearest whole number, so the number reduces to "x + 5" and the other number " -(x + 5)" is ruled out because whole numbers do not include negative numbers. Now, Jab reduces the original number from the number obtained by Bill, so it becomes "x + 5 - x = 5". No matter then what x may be, the number that Mike is holding is always 5," says Vijayesh.

We let him have the honour of explaining everything only because he is a student of mathematics and the joke was on them. Otherwise, all experts are of the same opinion. Nitin Khanna has even tried this with many big numbers and found that the result is true for all x. Sidharth Khanna (Sacred Heart Convent Senior Secondary School, Ludhiana) and Priyanka Pardasani (Bhavan Vidyalaya, Chandigarh) have given us a clear and crisp analysis.

Thanks to our experts, Pravesh Bansal (Dharampur, Shimla Hills), Amandeep Gill (Gurdaspur), Vimal Jit Kaur, Madhur Sharma (BE, second year, Ranjit Avenue, Amritsar), Dr Neena Chawla (Department of Vegetable Crops, PAU, Ludhiana), Nishchint (B.Tech, IT, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, New Delhi) and Ravish (second year, electrical, PEC, Chandigarh), we now have a better idea of this mind game. (Write at The Tribune or adityarishi99@yahoo.co.in)