Lambdia

The gold bar payment

Seven pieces cost six cuts and the schedule pays correctly, so the six-cut answer breaks one constraint and nothing else. Because the worker can hand pieces back, the contract is on his holding rather than on the transfer, and the ledger turns out to be a three-bit counter. Brute force finds 1-2-4 is the only three-piece solution.

Also asked asgold bar · seven day gold bar · cutting the gold bar

Read the full explanationOne Gold Bar, Two Cuts, Seven Evenings: 1, 2 and 4

Trading brainteasers

A Half, from One Multiplication and No Calculus

Multiplying by the conjugate turns the difference into x over the sum of the same two terms, exactly, with no series and no error term, and dividing through by x reads off the limit one half. Completing the square gives a constant excess of a quarter, so the gap climbs toward a half strictly from below and never reaches it.

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GeometryHigh SchoolExplainer9 min

One Eighteen Inch Pizza Beats a Twelve and a Ten, by a Corner

The factor pi over four cancels off both sides, so the comparison is 324 against 244, about a third more pizza. Written that way it is the law of cosines: lay the three widths out as a triangle and the corner between the two smaller sides opens to 109.47 degrees, wider than square, which is the answer with no arithmetic at all.

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