In the warehouse there was an old game the older workers played with the new ones. The supervisor would call out two numbers, and whoever found the answer first did not have to sweep the floor.
That morning she called out: "Sixty and seventeen. Two numbers that multiply to sixty and add to seventeen."
Rustam started guessing at once. Ten and six? Their sum was sixteen. Twenty and three? Twenty-three. Thirty and two? Far too big. He tried ten and six again, having forgotten he had already tried it.
Malika did not guess. She wrote a short list, starting from the smallest. One and sixty. Two and thirty. Three and twenty. Four and fifteen. Five and twelve. She wrote the sum beside each pair as she went: sixty-one, thirty-two, twenty-three, nineteen, seventeen.
She stopped at the fifth line and put down the pencil. It had taken her under a minute, and she had not repeated a single attempt.
The supervisor smiled, because this was the point of the game. "Rustam is faster than Malika," she told the room. "But he has no order. He will find the answer eventually, and he will never know how close he was, and sometimes he will try the same pair twice. Malika is slower for the first ten seconds and finished before him."
Then she added the sentence they all remembered afterwards: "A systematic search is not clever. It is just a search you can finish."