The challenge in the last Mind Bender was to calculate the value of “X” in the following equation …
This time, there were a number of people who came up with the correct answer: Ron Drewitz, Daniel Hayden, Dominic Gatling, John Murphy, Margaret, Elka Melman, Tracey Bryan, Matt, Geoff and Vince Psaradakis.
So, well done to you all.
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Well, this Mind Bender stumped all but one person — Daniel Hayden. So, well done!
Remember … you had to balance 12 nails on top of a single nail, hammered into a block of wood.
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Most people managed to get it right … well, nearly.
A few of you thought it might be a pen — but the minute or two “recovery time” refers to a quick sharpening of a Pencil, after the fall. Whereas a pen (or Biro) may actually fail to work again.
Anyway, it was good to see so many respond this time. And I’ll have a new hands-on Bender in January — to get the whole family involved.
My apologies for not providing you with the solution before now. However, the past few weeks have been rather hectic.
You needed to sit back and think on this Mind Bender.
This time, there were a number of people able to “engineer” a 9-minute period for this Hourglass problem.
However, only a few of you managed to capture the spirit of finding the most elegant solution. Well done!
Start by turning both hourglasses over together.
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Last month only two people managed to come up with the correct solution, as well as the reason why. Therefore, I held back their postings until now.
The answer is that you should certainly take the odds of 30:1 on offer — because your chances of winning the wager are considerably better than that.
Anyway, for those of you still puzzling over the chances of two people having their birthday on the same day in the year, in a room of 23 unrelated people … here’s how you work it out.
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As you could see from the various responses posted for this Mind Bender … there is clearly more than one way to share the Wine Barrels between the three brothers.
However, the challenge this time was to come up with the solution that was the most elegant in its simplicity.
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The responses to this month’s Mind Bender were really quite interesting. And some of them stemmed from making an assumption based upon social bias.
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It’s not quite the end of the month, but those of you wanting to put forward a solution seem to have done so by now. And I deliberately held off posting your proposed answers — so that everyone could submit without any distraction.
But all your answers are up there now.
In posing the Mind Bender for June, I suggested that you need to quickly choose between an Intuitive or Deliberate thinking, in your approach to finding a solution.
Intuitively, you immediately think that, by adding just 2 metres to the length of the rope around the Earth … the gap would be extremely small. It may be large enough to slip a coin under; but certainly not large enough for you to crawl under.
But the solution to this Bender is found by using Deliberate thinking.
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The idea of introducing these monthly challenges was to help you to stretch your thinking. But sadly, some people are simply using Google to discover the solutions.
This month, the challenge was to come up with the common words that contained five consecutive Vowels and Consonants.
The emphasis being on “consecutive” and “common” …
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