Thursday, May 11, 2006
I have nothing to say
except that today is a typical day for me. Come to the office, type up queries and generate tables of data, get interrupted by phone calls, get back to your work and realized that you have lost your train of thought and you need five to ten minutes to get your bearings back. Yeeeep.Yesterday though was a different matter. I'm a total sucker for abstract mathematical discussions and stupid math problems (the kinds with the twist - you know about the twenty five peso rent and the missing peso? Those kinds), and in a book I read yesterday, there was this problem that made me utterly hate coconuts and monkeys.
The problem goes like this:
"Five men and a monkey were stranded in an island. To survive, they picked coconuts all day, and at the end of the day, they decide to start the splitting tomorrow morning, and everybody went to sleep.
In the middle of the night, however, one of the men woke up, and, thinking to get his share early, went to the pile of coconuts, and divided them (almost) evenly into five piles. One coconut was left over, and this he gave to the monkey. Then he hid his share, put back the rest into the pile, and went to sleep.
The second man did the same, dividing the coconut to five even piles, with one more coconut left over. The leftover went to the monkey, the man's share was hidden, and he went back to sleep.
This process repeated itself with the other men, each taking roughly 1/5 of the remainder and leaving one to the monkey.
In the morning, they divided the remaining coconuts among each other, and it was neatly divided among them, no leftovers (this was a modification of an older problem). The question now, is: How many coconuts were there in the beginning?
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na-solve ko sya!!! wanna know the answer?