I wrote a (very long) blog post about those viral math problems and am looking for feedback, especially from people who are not convinced that the problem is ambiguous.
It’s about a 30min read so thank you in advance if you really take the time to read it, but I think it’s worth it if you joined such discussions in the past, but I’m probably biased because I wrote it :)
The absolute value of a, times b, times the absolute value of c (which would be more naturally written as b|ac|). Unlike brackets, there’s no such thing as nested absolute value. If you wanted it to read as the absolute value of (a times the absolute value of b times c), then that’s EXACTLY the same answer as the absolute value of (a times b times c), which is why nested absolute values make no sense - you only have to take absolute value once to get rid of all the contained signs.