ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Symmetric difference quotient

Okay, let's imagine you have a big plate of cookies. If you want to know how good each cookie tastes, you can take a bite out of one and see how it tastes. But what if you want to know how much better one cookie is compared to another?

Here's where the symmetric difference quotient comes in. It's like taking two bites of different cookies and comparing how much better or worse they each taste.

Let's say you take a bite out of two cookies, Cookie A and Cookie B. The symmetric difference quotient tells you how much better one cookie is compared to the other by taking the difference between the ratings of the cookies and dividing it by the average of the two ratings.

In simpler terms, you're comparing the difference between the tastiness of Cookie A and Cookie B, and dividing that by the average tastiness of the two cookies. This gives you a number that tells you how much better one cookie is than the other.

So, if Cookie A tastes 9/10 and Cookie B tastes 6/10, the difference in tastiness is 3 (9-6). The average tastiness of the two cookies is 7.5 ((9+6)/2). So, the symmetric difference quotient would be 0.4 (3/7.5). This means Cookie A is 40% tastier than Cookie B!

The same concept can be applied to other areas like math and science, where you compare the difference between two values and divide it by the average of the values. This can help us understand how much one thing is changing compared to another thing.