xkcd #3125: Snake-in-the-Box Problem
Title text:
Chemistry grad students have been spotted trying to lure campus squirrels into laundry hampers in the hope that it sparks inspiration.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3125/
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What about goats in circular pens? A goat is tied to the fence of a circular pen. How long does the rope need to be so that the goat can reach exactly half of the pen’s area? What sounds like a high school math problem was eventually solved in 2020 via complex analysis.
Here’s the answer:
I feel like the answer should be much simpler than that equation salad.
Randall forgot psychology, which has involved a ton of putting animals in boxes…
Also zoology
I guess a key thought experiment doesn’t qualify as a reason, and also we are supposed to conveniently forget about putting spherical cows in a vacuum just because.
We have one for combinatorics: Ask Fibonacci about his rabbits.
Either I’m misunderstanding the problem or a length of 8 is possible.
Edit: found my mistake, far left edge has two non-consecutive segments on adjacent corners. Leaving this up in case anyone else tries for a better score.
This should do it, or am I missing something?
Unless your snake is an ouroboros, I don’t think folks will count the head and tail as consecutive
The head and tail aren’t adjacent if you only look at my blue line and not the original. But my attempt fails due to the far left edge.
I’m still trying to fill that hotel with infinite monkeys
In biology it’s less of a “thought” experiment
More of a “This is how we weigh a critter that won’t stay put for more than .3 seconds”
There really is an xkcd for everything.
My combinatorics professor used gnomes!
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Took me a while to follow that too! The three examples of fails at the top each show instances where there are non-consecutive parts of the snake on adjacent corners - it’s the lines highlighted in red.
Basically no two parts of the snake that aren’t directly joined to each other in the snake are allowed to be on corners which are only a line apart.
I think.
Any two coils that are not directly connected. For example, suppose we number from the head, coil 1, 2, 3, 4. Then pairs that are not directly connected are: (1, 3), (1, 4), (2, 4). The endpoints of these pairs of segments cannot be connected by an edge of the cube.
