Calculating 25 minutes by burning 2 inconsistently burning 1-hour ropes (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by MrMusAddict@lemmy.world to c/math_riddles@lemmy.world

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Calculating 25 minutes by burning 2 inconsistently burning 1-hour ropes

You are given two ropes and are told that they burn at inconsistent rates, but will always take 1 hour to completely burn up. This means that cutting one of the ropes perfectly in half will not give you two smaller 30-minute ropes.

You are told that you need to approximately calculate 25 minutes by burning these ropes in some fashion.

How do you accomplish this?

Hint:

first ½ of hint

I carefully chose approximately instead of precisely

second ½ of hint

because to calculate it precisely would require that you ignite an infinite number of flames

Welcome! (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by MrMusAddict@lemmy.world to c/math_riddles@lemmy.world

0 comments fedilink

Hey everyone. I’m coming from Reddit and I’m new to Lemmy, and wanted to join all of the communities that I was subscribed to on Reddit. I’m noticing that, to my knowledge, there isn’t a Math Riddles community yet on any instance. So I’ve created one.

I have some minor mod experience on Reddit, but this is definitely not something that I expect to be hardcore monitoring. I mainly just wanted to open the community to give us a space to post interesting riddles!

If there’s any Lemmy specific best-practices you’d like to see here, please let me know!

Math Riddles

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