Ken’s Law

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What Does Ken’s Law Mean?

Ken’s law is a somewhat obscure theory used often in geocaching, where new technology helps hunters to look for specifically located packages. Ken’s law states that the difficulty of finding something is directly proportional to the size of the object.

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Techopedia Explains Ken’s Law

Although Ken’s law may not be much used outside of the geocaching community and other specific science applications, there is a major controversy over whether this theory can be backed up in practice. Some believe that it’s simply common sense that a smaller object is more difficult to find, while others argue that Ken’s law fails to take many other factors into account, many of which are related to the environment in which the object is hidden.

Critics of Ken’s law could make some fairly sensible cases against its reliability. For example, one could easily argue the difference between finding two identically sized objects, one on a plain, and the other in a complex, environment. However, it can also be argued that in general, Ken’s law can hold true, given a certain statistical sample and controlled factors.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ??a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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