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        riddles >> easy >> Nonhomogeneous rope burning
        
(Message started by: Immanuel_Bonfils on Feb 10^th, 2009, 10:28am)

Title: Nonhomogeneous rope burning
Post by Immanuel_Bonfils on Feb 10^th, 2009, 10:28am

you have two ropes, each of which takes one hour to burn completely. both of these ropes are nonhomogeneous in thickness, meaning that some parts of the ropes are chunkier than other parts of the rope. using these nonhomogeneous ropes and a lighter, time 45 minutes.

Note: Some clarification on what is meant by nonhomogeneous. For instance, maybe a particular section of rope that is 1/8 of the total length is really chunky, and takes 50 minutes to burn off. then it would take 10 minutes to burn off the remaning 7/8, since we know that the whole rope takes an hour to burn off. that's just an example; we don't know any such ratios beforehand. The point is, if you look at one of your ropes and cut it into pieces, you have no clue how long any individual piece will take to burn off.

Note: I just "copy/ paste" it from Riddles Site, but it's vey easy!

Title: Re: Nonhomogeneous rope burning
Post by towr on Feb 10^th, 2009, 10:56am

Most of the easy riddle have been answered before in this thread (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=riddles_easy;action=display;num=1027806697).
(Which can be found by setting the maximum age a sufficient number of years back in the search function (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=riddles_easy;action=search); in case you're wondering why you couldn't find it when you searched.)