DG. Ants on a Rod

December 26, 2007 · The Mathcast, answers, math puzzles · Permalink

«« DF. The Best Full House· · · Q & A: A little puzzle »»

Peter Winkler tell us which full house to choose, and asks: How long must we wait until all the ants fall off the rod?

 
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1 Comment »

  1. jlundell said,

    December 28, 2007 at 7:33 pm

    100 seconds, the simplifying insight being that, for our purposes, the collision behavior of the ants is equivalent to the ants simply passing each other and swapping name tags.

    The minimum time approaches zero as the minimum ant-to-ant spacing approaches zero (and since this is a math puzzle, we can presumably treat the ants as dimensionless points).

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