Guest #9, what is your Blŏŏdy Point? Your formula is odd. .50x +4001 = 6,000, solve for x. Where do you get the 4001 from --aside from Alan’s starting point? You would not have this as the starting point for a solution without some kind of calculation.
You could do this x+ 0.5x = 6000 | x=4000 this sets Xj and Xj+1 to 4000, which is what I did.
So, what is the point of your brain-dead presentation? I am missing something? You restate Alan’s sequence in regurgitated form; add some blatantly wrong blarney to the end, then say “There are only two unique solutions. That is, with the initial weight of either 4,000 or 4,001 Kg.”
Well, No freaking duh!
I agree there are only two solutions to this: 4000 and 4001. (A circular reference error in my spreadsheet affected the values; giving false results indicating 4002-4007 were also valid.) You didn’t bother mentioning this; rather, you meander all over Hades, while adding more blatantly irrelevant blarney. Maybe all these elephants leaving piles of dung on this post affected your thinking process.
You should join with the Blarney Banker and call yourselves Blarney and Blarney. You two can make Blarney the old-fashioned way –by regurgitating it.
(Note to Chimp Henry: Order 50 more cases of extra-strength gnome repellent).
Note to Blarney Banker: Yes, I have the gene for curse and cur. I inherited it from an ancestor we have in common. We genetically enhanced chimps learned how to suppress this gene, so it’s not active, except when blarney bags are near. It is active in you though, just as it is in all human-pịg hybrids, procreated by miscegenation. (See what I mean by “annoying the pịg.”)
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On a brighter note, though shrouded in a fog of blarney, I found the original source for this question. It appears the examiners altered the parameters of the question to allow for an additional or different answer –one that isn’t trivial.
Mathematical Circles: (Russian Experience) (1996) (ISBN: 0821890603)
By Sergeĭ Aleksandrovich Genkin, Dmitriĭ Vladimirovich Fomin
Here is the question:
123. Twenty-five elephants stand in a row in a circus arena, and each of them weighs an integer number of kilograms. It is known that if you add the weight of any of them (except the rightmost one) and half the weight of its neighbor to the right, then the result is 6 tons. Find the weights of the elephants.
There is no answer or hint for this question presented in the book.
In this question, it only asks for the weight of the elephants, there is no reference to the heaviest, not that it matters, it there is only one integer solution: 4000Kg.
It is interesting that if the question presented in integer number of grams then there could be as many as 23 before any elephant exceeds 6 (metric) tons.
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