Today Puzzle #772
Puzzle No. 772鈥� Tuesday 30 June 2020
Last week’s puzzle we saw that a square theatre with a 2 metre minimum separation can squeeze in 9 people — or 25 if you halve the separation to 1 metre. However, we ignored how much space audience members require for themselves. If each person takes a half metre square in each direction and 9 just fit with a 2 metre separation, how many can you fit with a separation of 1 metre?
Today's #PuzzleForToday has been set by Biotechnology PhD student David Baynard from Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Click here for the answer
The previous puzzle, and its solution, ignores that no matter how slim, we all take up some space.
If we each take up 0.5m鈥�×鈥�0.5m, then each edge is not 4m but 5.5m. We can only fit 4 people in that space, if we reduce the distance to 1m (3 gaps of 1m + 4鈥�×鈥�0.5m per person). That would give us 16 people in the square, i.e. not even double.
We could reconfigure the chairs to be offset, in which case we would hope to be able to fit an extra row of 4 — taking us to 20. But because each person is 0.5m wide, and we only have 0.5m per row to play with, we don't actually get to move the rows closer together by offsetting. Though at least the audience members would get a better view.
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