Instead, I'm going to set a very simple mathematical problem based on something I saw pointed out last week, I will credit where I saw it but not yet as that kind of ruins the effect. It's really simple maths, or as americans would say "math", I assume they dropped the 's' to make it available for referring to Lego as "Legos"...
The "puzzle"
You can try one combination per second.
How long will it take to try all valid combinations?
Give the answer in weeks, days, hours, minutes & seconds
(don't scroll down if you want to work it out, this is just padding
in case anyone is actually interested enough
to post the answer in the comments)
.
..
...
....
Huh - elegant answer. Similar to the observation I saw recently that 10! seconds is 6 weeks because 6 weeks is:
ReplyDelete(6) [weeks]
*(7) [days in week]
*(3*8) [hours in day]
*(sqrt(9)*5*4) [minutes in hour]
*(sqrt(9)*10*2) [second in minute]
Exactly 7 days... Interesting
ReplyDelete1 week. You have 10 possiblities for the first lock, but only 9 left for the second and 8 for the third... So, the number of combination (or seconds) is 10*9*8*7*6*5*4=604800 seconds... that's 1 week.
ReplyDeleteI just thought it was cool, I saw the Mathjam Tweet (as described by Tom) but wanted to eliminate the '6' from the six week answer, 7 of 10 dials is 10!/3! combinations and 3! is of course 6. More proper blog posts coming soon
ReplyDelete7 Days :)
ReplyDelete