August 2018
 

[url]http://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/ponderthis/challenges/August2018.html[/url]

Ha! The "very old riddle about Alice and Bob" carrying canisters of water through Sahara, is in fact a two centuries old Romanian story called "[URL="https://www.scribd.com/document/143811254/Five-Loaves-of-Bread"]5 loaves of bread[/URL]", which we learned in primary school - the guy who wrote the story is a very famous writer and narrator that lived those times... Now, more than solving the puzzle, I am quite interested to know what is the oldest version of this story? Anybody knows about it?


Edit: I was quite reticent to give the link, because I have never seen in my life such an idiotic retelling of a story - all the fun is lost... I would hang that lady who translated it... I think Ion Creangă is turning upside down in his grave... But I didn't find another, and searching the web gives only the biblical sh!t with the two fish... there is no fish here... so...

I'm glad I figured the loaves-of-bread version the same way the judge did!

Thirds of loaves (or gallons of water) I can understand. But tenths of droplets of water?

Haha... :tu:

[url]http://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/ponderthis/solutions/August2018.html[/url]

Nice! We never got to solve this challenge (no time, no knowledge, old age, etc, insert you favorite excuse). The reading about the prime thing is quite interesting, as well as the idea of putting "IBM" into those numbers (however, my bitchy alter-ego tells me that using 1 and 0 instead of 1 and 2 would have been nicer... :razz:)