Alex Bellos Monday Puzzles

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detuned
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Alex Bellos Monday Puzzles

Post by detuned »

Came across this at work today:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/seri ... day-puzzle

The family planning exercise woefully exposed just how rusty my analysis ability was (i.e. show that the sum from n=0 to infinity of n / 2^(n+1) is 1 - although also note you can argue this from a purely probabilistic point of view much more easily) - but have a look at Hidato as well.
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PuzzleScot
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Re: Alex Bellos Monday Puzzles

Post by PuzzleScot »

Hang on - someone's making money from solving puzzles?? Anyway...

The family planning one is the gender-reversed version of the Chinese 1-child-system problem:
Chinese families were only permitted to have one child, to stem the population explosion.
However, farming families said they needed a son to take over the business.
So an exception was made - In rural communities, you could keep having children, if they were female, until the first male was born.
What effect did this have on the rural gender balance?

I do like these counter-intuitive problems. Thanks.

The Hidato wasn't so bad. I have often thought we should have a video series of our own explaining how to solve each of the common types - a video version of the walkthroughs on here.
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Re: Alex Bellos Monday Puzzles

Post by detuned »

Definitely worth sharing Monday's post - Area Maze is a lovely idea!

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015 ... choolchild
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