All "doors" and "wheels" count. What is a door or a wheel? I will avoid defining what counts and what doesn't count, you must decide that for yourselves. Make your arguments and present your math!
I will be the abjudicator, and will only resolve if I am convinced or perceive consensus; I will not bet. I do not "know" the answer ahead of time. YES is Doors, NO is Wheels.
I may extend the close date if it seems necessary.
This is part of a short series of thought puzzles:
1,000🏅 Top traders
| # | Trader | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ66 | |
| 2 | Ṁ35 | |
| 3 | Ṁ20 | |
| 4 | Ṁ18 | |
| 5 | Ṁ11 |
I am largely convinced and I perceive general consensus. This is will likely resolve NO after close. Please present counterarguments if you have them.
I posed the question of chatgpt 4, and I bet NO based on that answer. Here is chatgpt4 answer: Determining whether there are more doors or wheels in the world is a challenging question that involves a lot of variables. However, I can attempt to make an educated guess based on various considerations.
### Doors:
1. Residential Buildings: Consider every home, apartment, and residential building in the world. Most homes have multiple doors, including front doors, back doors, and internal doors.
2. Commercial Buildings: This includes offices, malls, schools, and so on, which have numerous doors, including entrance doors and internal partition doors.
3. Public and Government Buildings: These often have many doors for various rooms and compartments.
4. Vehicles: Cars, buses, trains, airplanes, and boats also have doors.
5. Furniture: Things like wardrobes, cabinets, and some types of tables have doors as well.
6. Miscellaneous: Think about small doors in things like mailboxes, pet doors, and so on.
### Wheels:
1. Automobiles: Cars usually have at least four wheels, and there are billions of cars in the world.
2. Bicycles: These have at least two wheels, and there are also billions of bicycles worldwide.
3. Public Transport: Buses, trams, and trains all have wheels.
4. Industrial Equipment: Think about factory machinery, carts, wheelbarrows, etc.
5. Airplanes: While not always considered, airplanes also have landing gear wheels.
6. Toys: Small wheels on toy cars, skateboards, scooters, etc.
7. Miscellaneous: Wheels in everyday items like office chairs, luggage, and shopping carts.
### Analysis:
1. Scaling Factor: Doors usually come in fewer numbers per item compared to wheels. For example, a car might have 4-5 doors but it has 4-8 wheels (including spare wheels). Similarly, a bicycle has 2 wheels but no doors. Even a bus or a train compartment, which might have 2-4 doors, will often have more wheels.
2. Ubiquity of Wheels: Wheels are also used in various small-scale applications like toys, office chairs, luggage, etc., which increase their numbers exponentially.
3. Replacement Rate: Wheels tend to wear out and get replaced more frequently than doors, contributing to the manufacturing of new wheels at a more rapid pace.
4. Industrial and Agricultural Use: Wheels are crucial in various machinery and agricultural equipment, whereas doors are not usually a component in these scenarios.
Based on these considerations, my educated guess would be that there are likely more wheels in the world than there are doors. The scaling factor, higher replacement rate, and broader range of applications for wheels make them more numerous in my estimation.
I think a big argument on wheels are toys. How many toy cars/vehicles are in the world? Most of them don't have "openable" doors, so for me, they are not even doors, just painted in a fixed piece of metal/plastic. Even if some of them have doors, they can have at max. as many as wheels, so, for me, because of this and every other argument in this lane, is a clear win for Wheels.
At first I thought that there were more doors, since doors are completely different, from ordinary entrance doors and doors between rooms to doors in closets and refrigerators. If we only consider the wheels on various vehicles, many of which also have doors, it seems obvious that there are more doors. However, if we also take into account all the small wheels, for example, on office chairs, each of which has 5 wheels, and millions of such chairs are produced every year, then I would vote that there are more wheels in the world than doors.
There are about 1.474 billion cars on Earth in 2023, and there are somewhere around 1 billion bikes in the world. (Pioneer Sports)
Most of the wheels are placed in cars. However, most cars have four wheels and four doors each.
And also It's estimated that more than 10 billion doors in rooms are manufactured each year. (cleanroom doors.com,2022)
from my point of view, there will be more doors than wheels.
@Stralor I think maybe add something in the description that it is only in English or something (it is only a proposition) because one possible translation of logic gate in French is "porte logique", and the main definition of "porte" is door to me, so maybe the idea that a logic gate is a door is a little odd, depending on the idiomatic stuff.
@nlhm a "gate" a "portal" and a "door" are all related and sometimes synonymous, but they are different words in English so it's up to the other traders
@nlhm I really do think you made a good point. I'm just being cryptic in these riddles because I am only listening to arguments, not presenting them
Argument for wheels: there are lots of very small wheels being used for all sorts of things.
All of these numbers are very lazily googled because I believe the argument is very strong.
Around 2.2 billion houses. A house could have anywhere from 0 to 100 doors (counting cupboard doors and things). Let's say 10.
1.5 billion vehicles, including 1.1 billion cars. Vehicles have more wheels than doors. A standard western family car has 5 doors and 6 wheels (spare and steering count), but it's very common to have fewer doors. You also get lorries (trucks) with 3-4 doors and many wheels. (Are we counting trains in this? If so they go wheel-wards.) So I think it probably comes out wheels-first, maybe by a billion or two.
1 billion bicycles. Naively, that's 2 billion wheels.
600 million motorbikes. Naively, 1.2 billion wheels.
So far doors seem to be winning (because I included cupboards) but there are SO MANY TINY WHEELS. My dishwasher has 24 wheels. My two deskchairs have 10. Two trollies have 8. Vacuum cleaner has 4 obvious ones. My desk drawers have a bunch. There must be a couple in my food processor and power drill. Even some of my doors have wheels! Those little nubs that bounce in to hold the door closed!
And that's just household stuff. How many wheels are there in a factory? Hell, we were talking about cars earlier and concentrating on the boring ones that go on the ground. How many are there in the engine? Flywheel? Gear wheels? I don't know much about engines, but there are definitely a few.
Lego famously makes lots of wheels. The easily googled answer is 381 million in 2010. I'm sure that's more than they made a couple of decades ago, but even if it was 100 million a year for 20 years, that would be 2 billion.
How many wheels are in scrap? For my cars and bikes estimates above I went for some (admittedly fairly random) sources on total number on the go today. But a more reliable method would be integrating over production figures over time. Some of those wheels will have been destroyed, but some will be sitting around.
Well, I sort of started trying to quantify this and then fizzled out. But it's definitely wheels. The big things to consider are probably:
Housing
Transportation
Manufacturing (as in the factories themselves)
Toys?
Housing could go either way. My house has more wheels than doors but I expect some are the other way.
Transportation must be like 5 billion wheels advantage, right? Hard to say when I don't know how many gear wheels the average car or bicycle has!
Manufacturing, hell if I know, but it's more than doors.
Toys are clearly more than doors. Sure you get the odd dolls house, but there are 6 billion hot wheels out there that I forgot to mention!
I suggest that if anybody wants to dispute this, they either suggest a fifth category of things (that has more doors than wheels) and show that it's in the billions, or argue that one of my four is more doors than wheels. I think wheels have a comfortable lead in all of them, with the possible exception of housing, which could be close.
@Stralor I thought it was obvious. I'll make my argument in a top level comment.
(Edit: this isn't actually the reason. I was just a bit busy)