Search results for: “geek challenge”
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Geek Challenge: A Place in the Sun
You are an engineer on site in Lebanon, Kansas. At sunrise on the vernal equinox, you hop in your hovercar and start driving directly toward the rising sun along the ground at a constant 60 mph. You continue driving in this way until the sun sets. What are your coordinates when you stop driving? Parameters…
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Geek Challenge Results: Primetime Telephone Numbers
In last month's Geek Challenge, we asked what number contains 22 primes? This was a unique problem that needed to utilize at least a little bit of computation (to check if something is prime or not). Luckily, prime calculators are a dime a dozen across the interwebs and many computer languages have a “prime check” method…
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Geek Challenge: Primetime Telephone Numbers
I was listening to the radio, and some self-proclaimed geek said that her phone number was "seven prime numbers." At first, I interpreted this as "seven prime digits," which is probably what she meant. But then it got me thinking, 23 has three prime numbers in it (2, 3, and 23), and 373 contains six…
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Geek Challenge Results: The Perfect Bracket
Congratulations to Grant Anderson of DMC, Michael Deck of Avant, and John Jacobsma! All correctly answered last month’s Geek Challenge with C: 93.424%! Michael Deck is this challenge’s winner for his extensive solution that not only solves the proposed problem but handles more involved aspects not considered by the OP. Michael’s solution is below. 1…
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Geek Challenge: The Perfect Bracket
With March Madness wrapping up and everyone’s brackets broken once again, this month’s Geek Challenge is about what it might take to build the perfect bracket. It's time for all the mathletes out there to show off their skills. Imagine that for every game in the NCAA tournament you know the probability p for the…
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Geek Challenge Results: Eccentric Traveler
The results are in! February's Geek Challenge winner is Grant Anderson of DMC. Grant's clever breakdown of the problem is shown below. Grant's Solution There are five classifications of locations that satisfy this riddle (at least on the surface): For ease of calculations, we’ll assume the earth is perfectly spherical, rather than the ellipsoid it…
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Geek Challenge: Eccentric Traveler
This month’s geek challenge focuses on some strange sightseeing aspirations of an eccentric traveler. Our eccentric traveler’s odd expedition begins by considering the following riddle: You walk one mile South, then one mile East, then one mile North. When you finish walking, you are at your original location. Where are you? After initially deducing the solution to be the…
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Geek Challenge Results: Infinipool
The results are in! Two people correctly answered December's geek challenge. Ken Brey of DMC and Jesse Batsche of DMC both identified the correct percentage as D: 60-65%. Ken supplied an exact solution for the probability as the grid of pool balls becomes infinitely large. However, Jesse is this month's winner because he wrote a really cool LabVIEW program to solve the…
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Geek Challenge: Infinipool
December’s Geek Challenge is about trying to make pool shots on an infinitely large pool table. To describe the challenge, let’s look at a 3×5 grid of pool balls with the cue ball positioned in the center. We want to know what the odds are that we can hit a ball chosen at random with…
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Geek Challenge Results: Fractal Snowflake
The winner of the Fractal Snowflake Geek Challenge is John Jacobsma of Dickson. Tim Jager of DMC also responded with a correct value of C, 10830. The Fractal Snowflake Challenge was a study in recursive programming. Recursive programming is a technique where a function calls itself, usually many times, until eventually instead of calling itself,…
