I love this puzzle.

[theweaselking]

It's surprisingly tricky.

Comments

[malovich]

~19.142

And problems like this illustrate why I despair over learning ancient and alien languages when we encounter them.

[theweaselking]

As I said up above: I find it very weird to look at two things on a table and say "that is $thing squared" instead of "that is two of $thing"

[malovich]

I personally find it hard to look at symbols with numbers and not use mathematical notation. Hence the despair at translations; how the heck can we decide what someone was thinking when they wrote something from a completely different context?

m + m + m = 30
m + h + h = 20
h + ff + ff = 9
h + m * f = 19.42

[kafziel]

Ultimately, I think it's just that the fries doubling trick is kind of shitty. Maybe the two fries symbol means fries + fries. Maybe the two fries symbol means fries * fries. Maybe the two fries symbol is just a different symbol than the fries symbol, the way vv and w are not the same even in fonts where they look the same. But the only reason it's there isn't to catch people who screw up their match, it's to catch people who see "fries" and don't scrutinize the image closely enough to realize that these are two different fries pictures, so I figure as long as you return an answer that signifies that you spotted it, you got a correct answer to a bad question.