math Space Race Another FiveThirtyEight Riddler.The President has bestowed upon you 1 billion dollars with the mission of getting us to an alien artifact as fast as possible! Here's whats available to you: Big Russian engines costing 400 million each. Buying one will reduce the trip time by 200 days. Buying two
riddle Impossible Puzzle Another weekly FiveThirtyEight riddler, and this one's a mind-bender. Three very skilled logicians are sitting around a table — Barack, Pete and Susan. Barack says: “I’m thinking of two natural numbers between 1 and 9, inclusive. I’ve written the product of these two numbers on this paper that I’
math Casino Game The solution for this weeks FiveThirtyEight riddler is pretty nutty. The riddle is essentially: If you drew random numbers from a uniform distribution from [0,1], what is the expected number of draws you would perform until their sum exceeds 1? So let us define $$S_{n}$$ as the sum
