Hypothetical situation:
There is a banana plantation, where the owner has 3,000 bananas. He decides to sell his bananas at a market 1,000 miles away, and use his trusty monkey to carry them there. The monkey can carry no more than 1,000 bananas at a time. Each mile the monkey travels, he consumes one of the bananas he's carrying. The monkey will die if he ends up stranded with no bananas. What is the maximum number of bananas he can take to the market?
Answer on Tuesday!
Sunday, October 4, 2009
«Monkey Math»
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It depends. How well do the bananas keep?
ReplyDeleteIf the bananas keep well enough, and I don't need to get the monkey home, I can get 444 bananas to market.
ReplyDeleteI get 500, but the monkey is sold in the market. Not sure if this is the max yet ...
ReplyDeleteOoh, 500, I see. Using a variant of that method, I can get 500 of every 8000 bananas to market, and bring the monkey back. Can anyone do better than 1/16th of a large supply, returning the monkey?
ReplyDelete@ Nathaniel: There's only 3,000... not 8,000 bananas. And if Looney's 500 is true, then the answer I have is wrong.
ReplyDeleteRrevision: 533 and 1/3rd bananas to market, starting with 3,000. Wonder what the number is if the monkey turns out not to be "trusty".
ReplyDelete@ Looney: Let's say for the sake of simplicity, the monkey eats the entire banana when he eats. No fractional bananas.
ReplyDeleteThen 534 bananas will make it to market, because he will have a third of a mile to go before needing the next banana.
ReplyDeleteErrrr, 2/3rds of a mile to go ...
ReplyDeleteAm I missing something? If there's 1000 miles to travel and the monkey eats one of his thousand bannanas per mile then by the time he gets there they are all gone anyway. 0
ReplyDelete