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Michael L Perry

Improving Enterprises

Principal Consultant

@michaellperry

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Watch movement

In Q.E.D. Hour, we will be proving things about our code. To get the group started in thinking about proof, I assigned some homework. It has to do with a watch. The mechanism inside of a wristwatch is known as a movement. It has many moving parts, but all of those parts work together in unison. It measures only one thing. It has only one degree of freedom. The secret to why the movement works is not in the parts. It is in the connections between the parts, where a connection is the point at which two moving parts touch. Which brings us to our proof. Given: A movement with 20 moving parts having one degree of freedom. Prove: There are ___ connections among those parts. Fill in the blank. I'm sure you already know the answer. But the challenge is to prove it. This is representative of the types of proofs that we will write in Q.E.D. Hour.